Translating Life Experience into Experiential Narratives Through Designing for Presence in VR

This enquiry extends practical understanding of how designing for presence in VR may translate life experiences into virtual reality (VR) experiential narratives. The enquiry includes collaborative research projects undertaken with individuals who shared their life experiences for translation into VR experiential narratives. Through their individual perspectives, they challenge complex, practical understandings of presence and enhance critical examination of how presence may be actively experienced through making and engaging with VR works. This enquiry produced three VR experiential narrative works: ‘Life is Beautiful. Always.’ – A translation of the life experience of multi-disciplinary artist, Marcel Schreur; oral cancer and vascular dementia survivor. This work, co-designed with Schreur, translates physical characteristics of Schreur’s condition into the embodied capacities of VR. ‘I Look for Them’ – Translates the life experiences of Ivanna Maszczak, a Ukrainian and survivor of the Soviet Gulag. This project considers appropriate VR design methods to translate Maszczak’s life experiences in collaboration with her and supports the interpretation of a VR experiential narrative based on her experiences. ‘Be That Ocean’ – A work that re-visits collaboration with Maszczak to explore the embodied, responsive capacities of presence in VR to encourage affective, embodied relationality with Maszczak’s experiences. Presence is understood to be the central defining quality of embodied engagement with VR experience; where a sense of embodied self and agency becomes manifest through active engagement with the phenomenal capacities of VR. By exploring some of the core properties of VR that relate to presence through a review of contemporary academic research and active engagement with VR design, the enquiry examines how designing for presence encourages affective, subjective relationships with VR experiential narratives. Through collaborative methodologies, the enquiry explores where collaborative VR design methods actively include collaborators in the production of VR works that translate aspects of their lives. This critically examines issues of authorship in the production of VR experiential narrative works and extends understanding of how VR can be used ethically as an experiential narrative platform. The enquiry critically examines how strategies to design for presence in VR invite affective, embodied engagement with translations of my collaborator’s life experiences, and where this encourages an embodied knowledge of their experiences in a way that is unique to VR. This yields insight into the nuances of designing for presence within VR experiential narratives. It contributes to knowledge within contemporary critical debates on the creative possibilities and ethical limitations of VR as an experiential narrative platform.