THE BLURRED LINES BETWEEN SPECTATOR AND CHARACTER: NARRATIVE INTEGRATION OF THE USER IN CINEMATIC VIRTUAL REALITY

In spite of the intense sense of immersion that Virtual Reality (VR) can incite, the interactivity of the user is always limited. In traditional narrative VR pieces, also known as cinematic VR (CVR), users can witness a story but can hardly impact it. This limitation creates a paradox in which users feel immersed in a virtual world but cannot interact with it. This article focuses on the narrative strategies used in CVR to integrate spectators within the diegesis. This paradox of immersion behooves scholars and creatives to rethink traditional narrative paradigms to apply them to this new medium. In this sense, the user’s limited ability to interact needs to reinforce the overall narrative premise. By analyzing a corpus of live-action CVR pieces, this article proposes a typology of users: different ways in which the spectator can be integrated in the story, navigating the overlaps between user, character, and focalizer successfully.

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