Passive Narrative

I was sitting in the sun on a friend's balcony last summer when two new words popped into my head: fixies and choosies. Neither of them are real words. Yet. But hear me out. 

With movies, we have documentaries and narratives. Features and shorts. Independent and Hollywood. Film is a 100+ year old industry so its categories have branched and matured into a rich array of story types. I've wondered what a similar primitive storytelling dichotomy might be for VR stories. And I think a key one has to do with interaction.

In VR, unlike in film, you have agency. At a basic level, you have agency to look wherever you want, but what I'm talking about is real agency to go anywhere, pick up things, interact with characters, and change the outcome of a story. To choose what you do, and have your own journey. Some of the pieces we've built give you so much agency that literally no part of the story happens unless you do something.  If it sounds a lot like a computer game, you're on the right track, but they're not exactly games, because there's no way to win. I call these Choosies. (Worth noting that even in amazing VR games like Half Life: Alyx, you cannot always influence the story, you can only influence the way in which you move through the story.)

But people don't always want to do stuff. Being an active participant takes effort. Sometimes we just want to veg out and watch Netflix. If VR is ever going to be a viable storytelling medium, we need to figure out a way to tell completely passive stories that don't even require you to look around (though you may, if you please.) I call these Fixies, because the events are totally fixed in time. 

I was meditating in the woods when my brain served me up this silly concept: two roommates, one ex, and a very saucy painting given as a tone-deaf housewarming present. We decided to film it using a photogrammetric model of my house that I'd already created, and an Azure Kinect depth sensor to capture 2.5-dimensional holograms. We hired ourselves as the actors because this is just a tech demo. If you have an Oculus Quest, you can download the apk and sidequest it onto yours here. If you have a Rift, the PC build is here.