Designing story worlds for VR, a comprehensive framework to ideate and conceptualize story worlds for virtual environments

Abstract

With the constant evolution of virtual reality (VR) technologies since the early 1990s and with the rapid adoption of this medium, I have observed a high level of interest from researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields attempting to design for virtual environments. Design for VR introduces many challenges; distinct conceptual denominations from different fields emphasize the diverse phenomena and mechanisms of the player and advise approaches to the construction of virtual worlds in different forms. Creating a VR experience implicitly requires designers to build a digital and three-dimensional world, considering aesthetical and behavioral cues as well as rules and information. The three-dimensional and spatial nature of VR as a medium, together with the multiple psychological mechanisms that put the user at the center of a digital environment and superimpose information on their sensory contingencies, intensifies the challenge for a creator to start building an experience. In this dissertation, I propose a framework that helps designers analyze and design story worlds for VR called analytical and design framework. I iterated a initial proposed framework, identifying the main layers of construction for an interactive story world in virtual environments, and transformed theories in design and player psychology into questions, rules, and choices to guide the ideation and conceptualization processes of designers. I used a combination of mixed methods, including game analysis, design workshops, surveys, self-assessments, and tests, to implement and iterate the tool. My findings provide evidence that the framework helps assess VR experiences by giving creators intentions, design informational strategies, resources, cues, and fictional events, as well as fostering author preparation and anticipation for the player through different stimuli. They also indicate that the framework successfully bridges vertically analytical levels of knowledge into generative design tools. Transforming mechanisms of the player into a framework of layers, rules, and choices to assist designers in developing a detailed VR story world. This allows them to ideate and develop a story world for VR in a brief time frame, from beginning to end. Our results illustrate how designers conducted multidimensional evaluations of the player, which are crucial to designing for VR. The designers evaluated the causality, plausibility, progression, sensory perception, and emotions of users while ideating and conceptualizing. The main considerations of the designers were the logical, sensorial, and emotional dimensions of the users. It was evident that this intervention has educational value since the participants’ confidence levels in their knowledge of using the framework were significantly higher in the post-test than in the pre-test. I also observed self-reported changes in the designers’ perceptions of VR experiences, such their attention shifting toward design elements, author intentions, cues, informational stimuli, causal and temporal relationships in events, and characteristics of realism and fiction.