This article about mixed reality and storytelling inspired my outcome, I find virtual reality too gimmicky so it would be interesting to look at mixed reality in a speculative way.
What will storytelling look like in 20 years? Will it still be on your television? Will it printed on paper or projected in 3D? Prophesying the future is hard. But, like fortune telling with tea leaves, sometimes the future can be glimpsed in what’s here right now.
Last year, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch – a nihilistic choose-your-own-adventure style film with five main endings – introduced Netflix viewers to a term that has only recently entered the TV lexicon: interactive storytelling. Following up-and-coming developer Stefan as he works tirelessly to create the most complex video game of 1984, Bandersnatch calls on the viewer to make his choices. Do you angrily douse your computer in tea or yell at your dad to blow off steam? Do you visit a therapist or shirk the session to follow a mysterious colleague? Sugar Puffs or Frosties? Bandersnatch is an example of a growing trend in storytelling space: too interactive for traditional TV, not quite interactive enough to be a video game.
Since 2007, the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier programme has been an incubator for artists and technologists experimenting on the boundaries of narrative, from tales told with haptic feedback to storyworlds explored in digital simulations. Now in its 12th year and in partnership with video game technology company Unity, New Frontier 2019 is a showcase of virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality storytelling, experiences that exist in an in-between space: not quite video game, not quite film, not quite theatre.