It took producers and screenwriters quite some time to develop the language of cinema. Virtual Reality is at the beginning of a similar journey. Apart from being touted as 'the next big thing' there are some strong reasons why immersive stories are a valuable addition to contemporary media. This post is about those attributes.

Visiting Remote places.

Virtual and mixed reality can take you to far off or inaccessible places and make them feel real. Those spaces become tangible like in no other media. Visitors, especially with HDM (head mounted display or head set), fell as if they are really there and makes the experience of being there real. We see simple examples of this kind of media used in the real estate industry and in Google street view. You know within minutes whether it is going to be worth your time paying a visit in real life.

Developing empathy through Mixed Reality Experiences

More complex offerings can simulate real experiences in a way that we develop empathy with the characters or situations that are being portrayed. Depending how the story is told, we may either witness the story as a third person or if the story is told in first person, we may feel the situation more directly, that the characters are talking directly to us. In other situations, for example training, we can be in a hazardous environment without being placed at risk, but are able to watch things unfold from a safe vantage point. But perhaps most powerful of all is fostering compassion through the feeling of intimacy, a one on one as a character tells us their story directly.

In those spaces where layout and scale are important the 360º view can show viewers directly how objects and people stand in relation to each other. Modeling data can be done with life size components. How high are those giants of the forest? Demonstrate it by looking down from the treetops. Researchers tell us that it gives a viewer agency and greater engagement with the content and more likely to be followed up with action. We know that this happens with good storytelling, it seems most likely that being more immersed in a story would amplify that effect.

Shapeshifting may be the new 'cinema' experience

A number of studies refer to the sense of storyliving or living the story, a sense of dual reality with the ability to shift shape. This will not be new for people who role play though computer games, that sense of living into another reality, which is perhaps not so different from what we are encouraged to do with spectacular real estate properties, or fantastic tourist destinations. As we reach for what we can only imaging, virtual reality can put it in our grasp.