VR is the Future (And Kind of a Buzzword)

 VR is really the next frontier for human interaction in my mind. Telling a story is one thing, but existing in a space while the world unfolds around you is completely another. Most of my exposure with VR has been with videogames up until this point, where people use avatars in a virtual space to become someone new or hide their identity. In this sense, VR is nothing new, only a more advanced way to escape your skin the way video games have allowed for decades. In many cases, however, you can use VR to get people to open up in ways they normally wouldn't. I brought up the example of a soldier talking about his worst day on deployment over VR during class. I truly feel like that interview wouldn't have been as good in any other setting. Whatever his reasons, the interviewee felt comfortable in that virtual space. Good VR storytelling will rely on making the user comfortable in a similar fashion. To tell a story it has to be as seamless and user-friendly as possible, otherwise, you'll have trouble dragging the reader through your narrative. This is where I feel like the VR stories we looked at for today fell short. This isn't any fault of the producers or storyteller, it's simply just because virtual spaces are incredibly new to us as a medium. Only in the last 100 years has this even been a concept, while we've had thousands to refine the art of speaking or writing. I think there's incredible potential here, we only have to give the medium some time to develop both technologically and conceptually.