The scene in Ready Player One, where Wade explains the 27 sectors of the OASIS is pretty essential, as it provides a lot of background and worldbuilding, context for the rest of the book. It would be a pretty good segment to produce in actual virtual reality too. As it’s just explanation, a lot of liberties could be taken with how it’s presented to the player. The creator could shuttle the viewer through each sector on a kind of conveyor belt. This would bypass one of the current limitations of VR, which is motion sickness, and the challenge of figuring out how to navigate a virtual space while staying relatively stationary in reality. Each sector could be presented as a single environment, surrounding the viewer, or extend in real scale. To enter the next sector, a floating doorway could separate the experiences. Because the world is supposed to be virtual, these liberties would be accepted more readily by the player. Because this scene is all about presenting the aspects of these separate “worlds,” it’s perfect to thrust a VR viewer into. Little interaction is required, all that is needed is to create a convincing feeling of space, and visual distinction between each environment. It’s an introduction, unfocused, to a world, which is exactly VR’s strength at the moment. It would allow the viewer to sit back, swivel their head, and just take it all in.
I watched Twin Peaks as an example of long-form television. I was already watching the series, but I continued with an analytical eye. Twin Peaks is primarily a crime/mystery/thriller show, but has undertones of the supernatural. The fact that it’s a visual media allows new clues and information, being revealed by the characters, to be segmented per-week. The story unravels slowly, but as the plot wears on many characters in the town Twin Peaks take a part of the spotlight. Some episodes will focus on some characters, and another on a different group. Most of the time it will feature at least some of the main plot-line and police force characters, but oftentimes episodes will be sprinkled in where the director focuses more on secondary characters, on a more personal narrative. I think this is how Twin Peaks became so popular, and how it really took advantage of it’s format. Television, specifically long-form, gives the director enough time to tell an, if not longer, wider story. A la
Comments
Post a Comment