With any story telling medium, there is the concept of the frame, the container in which the story is told. For certain mediums, like film and photography, this is the frame of the shot, telling the audience what they should pay attention to. For writing the frame might be the extent of what you can convey with the written word where a writer has to best determine how to build a world for the reader without losing their attention. Music has the frame of being a series of sounds, painting usually takes place on a flat surface, and dancing brings emotion to life through bodily movement. All these art forms have restrictions in their framing, but the pieces that are able to best utilize that same frame help you forgot about its existence.

What is the frame for virtual reality? This was difficult to determine because on Wednesday it felt that the frame surrounded and enveloped where I stood. The environments felt real at times. So what frame contains and restricts this medium?

That frame is interaction.

It would be easy enough to talk about when a virtual reality experience didn’t immerse. Obviously the times when technical difficulties, a lack of proper head tracking or poorly rendered video would all contribute to when the immersion was broken. But what I want to talk about is when I was immersed within the frame of VR.

This frame is defined by how much a user can look around, what can they pick up, where are they allowed to go and to what extent are they able to transfer real world intuitive movement into virtual reality. The programs that utilized this frame best were the ones that effectively ‘taught’ you how you should interact with the experience. If you were taught right, then not only would you avoid doing actions that would have you realize what you were looking at wasn’t real, but it could enhance the story as well.

In After Solitary you see the real life horror of being trapped in solitary confinement as a former inmate tells you about what he had to do to survive. You were always jumping around looking for the next small incursion into the space. Sounds had you spin about, scared of the banging and yelling from outside the door as your narrator would move about. It taught you that you couldn’t change the situation, that you had no influence on the small room that you were trapped in, briefly living the hell the narrator was subjected to.

Another example was a short Gear VR program I watched where, as I stood in the middle of the woods, as a giant robot hand, with the personality of a small puppy, jumped about me. The program kept what I was suppose to be looking at in a relatively restrained area. Slowly this area grew until the climax when the hands owner, a massive robot, walked up to me and like a scene from the Iron Giant bent down to give me a friendly and deep hello. I was being taught to begin expanding where my interest should lay visually and by the time something huge occupied my sight it felt not just right but as if the story had led up to it.

My biggest take away was with the game Super Hot that simply taught you how the world worked with only color. White objects were immovable, black objects could be picked up and red meant danger. But this simple color scheme let me immediately understand the world at a glance and even tricked me into believing that there was a desk to dive behind or a table to reach over. After ten minutes the game had subtly taught me so well on how to interact, that the story began to feel more impactful, despite there being next to no actual story.

It felt that despite the scale, quality or type of story, by teaching the user how they should interact with the world enhanced the experience. By subtly pairing the type of interaction with the type of story, even the most mundane or basic of tales would explode with immersion. Whether this might be a lack of control in solitary confinement, a growth in scale with a giant robot, or easily understanding what you can grab, by pairing the story and interaction thematically together, you could turn any story into an amazing experience.