"You'll Be Alice Adventuring in Wonderland!" Processes, Challenges, and Opportunities of Creating Animated Virtual Reality Stories

TL;DR

This paper explores the creation processes, challenges, and opportunities of animated virtual reality stories through interviews with creators, highlighting unique issues and future research directions in immersive storytelling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the end-to-end workflows and challenges faced by creators of animated VR stories, filling a gap in understanding this emerging field.

Findings

Identified ten key stages in VR story creation workflows.

Highlighted nine unique challenges in creating animated VR stories.

Compared VR story creation with general XR application development.

Abstract

Animated virtual reality (VR) stories, combining the presence of VR and the artistry of computer animation, offer a compelling way to deliver messages and evoke emotions. Motivated by the growing demand for immersive narrative experiences, more creators are creating animated VR stories. However, a holistic understanding of their creation processes and challenges involved in crafting these stories is still limited. Based on semi-structured interviews with 21 animated VR story creators, we identify ten common stages in their end-to-end creation processes, ranging from idea generation to evaluation, which form diverse workflows that are story-driven or visual-driven. Additionally, we highlight nine unique issues that arise during the creation process, such as a lack of reference material for multi-element plots, the absence of specific functionalities for story integration, and inadequate support for audience evaluation. We compare the creation of animated VR stories to general XR applications and distill several future research opportunities.