strange days: facilitating empathy through immersive ... · strange days displays the desire to...
TRANSCRIPT
Dr Jan Nåls
Strange Days:
Facilitating Empathy through Immersive Storytelling
www.arcada.fiContactperson:
Jan Nålstel:[email protected]
Strange Days will create examples of immersive storytelling in different Nordic contexts, using a contemporary 360VR-produc-tion as inspiration and reference: Traveling While Black (Williams, 2019). Strange Days displays the desire to understand immer-sive storytelling not as a technological challenge, but as an artistic one. Practioner-Based Enquiry is the primary research method. By joining up with staff and students from Kristiania University, Arcada will produce immersive stories that feature complex characters and stories, and that foster high-level empa-thy. This will benefit the artists and storytellers of the future, as well as the audiences that will interact with their works.
The project borrows its name from the 1990s film Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995) which tells of a future in which the main character becomes addicted to a novel immersive storytelling technology.
Immersion is an integral part of many of the fastest growing media technologies, such as 3D gaming, virtual reality (VR), aug-mented reality and other forms of extended reality (XR). The problem is that these tend to favour spectacle over story. When they incorporate stories into the immersion, they often do so from a first-person point-of-view, as in many of the most popular games (Bucher, 2017). The first-person P.O.V. greatly enhances immersion, but it does not foster other-oriented per-spective taking – i.e. empathy – since the focus is firmly on the viewers/users own experience and P.O.V. Strange Days is a research project that will challenge these prac-tises, by putting focus on human experience, not on technology.