Cinematic Virtual Reality: Telling or Living Stories in Virtual Environments
Abstract
The emergence of Virtual Reality (VR) and its progressive refinement as a modality of immersive expression has promoted the development of hybrid formats, such as Cinematic Virtual Reality – our object of study – that combines the modes of narrative representation of the two media. Assuming that the perceptual schemes and the processes of narration are closely linked to the medium, we will carry out a comparative analysis that aims to identify the symmetries and differences in the way VR and cinema tell stories. Our attention will be focused, above all, on the functional and ontological divergences between the process of telling a story and the experience of living it in a virtual environment, using categories and concepts extracted from narratology, film studies and new media with the purpose of contributing to a general theory of narration in VR and to a broader understanding of its links to the cinematographic language.
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