When I first started studying virtual reality in the mid-1990s, one of the things that wasn't mentioned was the *power of story* and using story deliberately as a design tool. Story is a design tool that you can use in any context, whether it's education, health care,
industrial settings, consumer, children of course. But it's a universal tool. And the reason is because stories are how our brains work. And I love this quote that says, "Tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever." So, think of storytelling as *interface*, giving users clues, sparking emotions, guiding discovery, inducing immersion – so, making them feel like they're more there;
providing a narrative backdrop to whatever they're doing. So, maybe it's a busy factory, they're learning to assemble, or maybe it's surgery – they're learning to do that. And maybe you have a whispering wind in the background or maybe you have the sound of a gentle clock ticking or a metronome for beat going 'tuh-tuh-tuh' – you know – in the background. Maybe you have lights changing or you have another character approaching you.
It might be an AI character that comes up to you and says something. Whatever it may be, it can provide that kind of encouragement or movement forward or pull so you bring people – you know – further down the hallway or down the end of the room or into the other world, whatever it might be. Think of story as a *UI wrapper*, as something that you use to wrap around the interaction,
to provide context or relevancy for the user. So, for example, imagine a button that's like a UI element, just a button, but imagine a button with smoke coming out of the top. There's a story there: Why is the button smoking or why is it covered with this fog? We can't do that in 2D. We can only offer things like texturing or shadows or animation. But what if the button spoke to you? What if the button said, "Hey – press me!" – you know.
Then that's a narrative hook. It's a way to induce, to pull someone in. And so, that's what we're talking about when we say story wrapper. Now, another thing storytelling does is to potentially *amplify presence*, to give presence a focus, to give your attention the direction that you're going in, that it might – you know – pull you in in a good way; it might pull you in in a bad way.
Not all tension is bad. You need tension in a story. That's the basis of stories. It's the tense moments of 'what's going to happen to me?' or to the character or to the scenario or the situation. So, you might want to be thinking about how you can deliberately create more presence when you need someone to. So, if for example, this was a VR piece and you walked up and everybody was
on their phones and maybe you said 'hello', maybe if you said 'hello' people came up from their phones and they smiled and somebody said 'hello', a couple of people said 'hello' to you as well, that would change the feeling you had as you did this. If they didn't do that and their heads are all down, it's creating a very different kind of spatial tension because you don't want to upset people, they're kind of there but they're not there, they're away on their phones. And you can see the difference in people that are talking, laughing, reading books versus on their
phones, and what that does in the real world. Think about that for your virtual environment. Now, the study of immersion – so, presence is you feel like you're there; immersion is that you feel like you're getting deeper and deeper into the immersive experience. That's why we call it immersive. So, you have like 20 seconds of use is where you get this idea of cognitive immersion or this feeling of like 'oh, I'm in this. I'm in this.'
So, it takes about 20 seconds, which is probably the stretch of time that you have to unfold the narrative, to provide affordances, provide ways for users to understand and interact. It's about that 20 seconds, and that's why you want this to be really smooth and easy and direct in those initial few seconds. And they're not looking and configuring and trying to understand what to do and feeling stupid or feeling
so overwhelmed or afraid that they're not getting what they should be doing. The next type of immersion is called *physiologic immersion* – the physiologic, so that's your whole body kind of feeling that immersion into that environment, three to five minutes. Three to five minutes is about halfway the length of a normal kind of VR experience if you're thinking 10 minutes is the average VR experience. It's important when you think about story flow that you avoid
the *overloading or underloading* of a user with UI elements. Underloading would be just there's not enough things to do, you don't really know what you should do. So, getting that balance right is really, really important, but think about the story, the flow where you're taking them, what happens next. So, think about narrative as a way to unfold the scene, what I call the *affordance canvas*.
That's what the user sees in front of them and they have these affordances. Think of it more like a cockpit in an airplane or a car where there are buttons, there are steering wheels, there are things that they can interact with to move the narrative forward. So, think of the narrative as a guidance system, a way to help someone get to the next step. So, for example, a little bird might drop in, and the little bird may start telling you things and start framing your journey or framing your tasks. It might be just a big voice in the sky – you know –
or maybe the Earth is shaking or ... so wrapping that around a narrative is a way to unfold that canvas, that affordance canvas. You hear me talk a lot about *narrative mechanics* to shape the experience, so that's what story is all about. It's about using those narrative-, those story-type mechanics like a little bird or a big thundering voice, or maybe it's an object that rolls towards you or that drops down in front of you
or that you find available to you in your backpack or in your toolkit or on your watch or whatever other types of narrative objects or devices you choose to put in the world. *Narrative mechanics* can be used to create an emotion for a purpose. You could also create a *mood* to add ambiance with a story.
So, this is a lot trickier to design specific emotions like discovery or intrigue; the closer you get, the more – you know – health goes up. That's an analogy from a game, for example, from a gaming UI.