EntangleVR++: Evaluating the Potential of using Entanglement in an Interactive VR Scene Creation System

TL;DR

EntangleVR++ introduces a novel entanglement-based approach for interactive VR storytelling, enabling creators to design correlated narrative sequences driven by player choices, and evaluates its usability and design strategies.

Contribution

This work presents EntangleVR++, a system leveraging entanglement concepts from quantum computing to enhance interactive VR scene creation, with an empirical evaluation of its effectiveness.

Findings

Four authoring strategies identified for designing relational VR narratives.

Participants found the system facilitated quick and intuitive scene creation.

Four key themes emerged from user interviews and analyses.

Abstract

Interactive digital stories provide a sense of flexibility and freedom to players by allowing them to make choices at key junctions. These choices advance the narrative and determine, to some degree, how the story evolves for that player. As shown in prior work, the ability to control or participate in the construction of the narrative can give the player a high level of agency that results in a stronger sense of immersion in the narrative experience. To support the design of this type of interactive storytelling, our system, EntangleVR++, borrows the idea of entanglement from quantum computing. Our use of entanglement allows creators and storytellers control over which sequences of story events take place in correlation with each other, initiated by the choices a player makes. In this work, we evaluated how well our idea of entanglement enables creators to easily and quickly design interactive VR narratives. We asked 16 participants to use our system and based on user interviews, analyses of screen recordings, and questionnaire feedback, we extracted four themes. From these themes and the study overall, we derived four authoring strategies for tool designers interested in the design of future visual interface for interactively creating virtual scenes that include relational objects and multiple outcomes driven by player interactions.