VR Without a Headset
Luis’s suggestion seemed silly, so I tried it. Wonderful ideas often hide behind a veneer of absurdity.
“Let’s build Gaia using just a pencil and paper,” he said.
“But why,” I asked.
It was so easy to prototype things in VR. I was already imagining building a simple world to float through using my familiar suite of software.
His reply was something noncommittal, “Let’s just try.”
So I dug through my moving boxes for a sketchpad and pencil, and went outside.
***
We’re now thinking about Gaia as a linear story that gives the user agency over how they move through it. Not a movie, which has a linear narrative but doesn’t give the user control over how they view it. Not a game, which lets the user win or lose, and might not have much story. This will be something in between the two. An active story, a story that requires you to learn and acquire skills in order to complete each chapter and get to the next. Our hunch is that by asking you to give us your effort, we will be allowing you to more fully embody Gaia as a character, and empathize with it, than if we simply showed you the Earth’s history from Gaia’s perspective.
Our first version of Gaia was prototyped in VR, using a combination of Unity models and sketched environments I made in Quill. VR is wonderful to prototype in. I’ve sketched everything from trikes to houses, and the infinitely scalable virtual world lets me effortlessly sit on the trike and walk through the house. So prototyping on paper seemed like solving a problem that didn’t exist. But as I set pencil to paper, I saw I'd been blind to the problem.
As easy as it was to prototype in VR, I was still bound by the rules of the software. And it was a subtle cage. I knew that this chapter would start with you embodying a fish, in an underwater cave. If I were in VR, I would have started to model the cave and the fish and an hour later I would have only the starting point of the chapter. But with pencil and paper, I drew an outline of the cave and fish in three seconds, then had to solve the real creative challenge -- what next?
Hmm, what about introducing a decision point? It could be helpful to make the user/viewer feel agency. Perhaps a decision that wouldn’t impact the linear narrative, such that whether they’d choose the left or right tunnel, they’d still end up at the same place. That kind of choice would create a sense of agency that is so important for feeling like you’re discovering something new.
And so my map unfolded, in fifteen minutes -- caves with spiky urchins that needed to be slipped past, a big hungry octopus with you on its menu, and a vast section of open ocean that you’d have to navigate in order to get to the safety of your coral home. Looking at the drawing I realized there was no way I could have designed this if I’d started in VR. So much of this story existed in my imagination. The low fidelity of paper drawings allowed a high-fidelity experience to form in my mind. It also led to a wild insight: you had to start the chapter as the octopus.
Seeing everything from the top down, I realized that in order to empathize with all life forms as Gaia does, you must be able to embody those at different ends of the food chain. If you start the chapter thinking that fish are food objects, what will be the emotional effect of being reborn as a fish? Will you realize that all food is a living thing until you eat it? And as the fish, will you understand that the octopus isn’t evil, it simply has different needs from you?
When I shared the concept with friends they were all able to imagine the chapter in their heads simultaneously -- something that couldn’t happen if I’d prototyped it in VR and popped them in one at a time. And Lara suggested something wild -- what if the next prototype still wasn’t in VR -- what if we acted it out? Seemed preposterous, so of course, I tried (and filmed) it.
Now I’ll never make a VR story any other way.
