The 1st International Conference on Virtual Storytelling took place on September 27–28, 2001, in Avignon (France) in the prestigious Popes’ Palace. Despite the tragic events of September 11 that led to some last-minute cancellations, nearly 100 people from 14 different countries attended the 4 invited lectures given by international experts, the 13 scientific talks and the 6 scientific demonstrations. Virtual Storytelling 2003 was held on November 20–21, 2003, in Toulouse (France) in the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum “Les Abattoirs.” One hundred people from 17 different countries attended the conference composed of 3 invited lectures, 16 scientific talks and 11 posters/demonstrations. Since autumn 2003, there has been strong collaboration between the two major virtual/digital storytelling conference series in Europe: Virtual Storytelling and TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment). Thus the conference chairs of TIDSE and Virtual Storytelling decided to establish a 2 year turnover for both conferences and to join the respective organizers in the committees. For the third edition of Virtual Storytelling, the Organization Committee chose to extend the conference to 3 days so that more research work and applications could be be presented, to renew the Scientific and Application Board, to open the conference to new research or artistic communities, and to call for the submission of full papers and no longer only abstracts so as to make a higher-level selection.

Storytelling for Virtual Reality serves as a bridge between students of new media and professionals working between the emerging world of VR technology and the art form of classical storytelling. Rather than examining purely the technical, the text focuses on the narrative and how stories can best be structured, created, and then told in virtual immersive spaces. Author John Bucher examines the timeless principles of storytelling and how they are being applied, transformed, and transcended in Virtual Reality. Interviews, conversations, and case studies with both pioneers and innovators in VR storytelling are featured, including industry leaders at LucasFilm, 20th Century Fox, Oculus, Insomniac Games, and Google. For more information about story, Virtual Reality, this book, and its author, please visit StorytellingforVR.com

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, ICVS 2003, held in Toulouse, France in November 2003. The 27 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers are organized in topical sections on real-time technologies, narrativity and authoring, mediation and interface, virtual characters, mixed reality, and applications.

Immersive augmented reality brings this action-packed fantasy to life. The town of Eden Grove has a legend: In the center of a pine forest there is an aspen grove, and in the center of the aspen grove is an ancient, magnificent tree. A tree that grants wishes. Mayberry and Marshall have heard the stories about the Wishing Tree, but they know nothing like that could really exist near their dreary town. Misunderstood and restless, the teenagers wish for a lot of things, including being on another planet altogether. Somewhere with magic and adventure—someplace where they can be heroes. And then the unlikeliest thing happens: On a hike through the forest, they find the Wishing Tree. The pair make their wish, fall asleep . . . and wake up on Nith, a world that is exactly what they asked for. The alien landscape is beautiful, but it’s also full of dangerous and fantastic creatures, and almost without exception, the creatures are hungry. Soon Mayberry and Marshall learn two very important facts about their wish: First, that magic comes at a very steep cost; second, that they can only be heroes if they can survive. The journey that follows will test the limits of their courage and strength . . . and change them in ways they haven’t begun to imagine. This epic work brings fantasy to life, first by inviting readers into another world, then by using cutting-edge augmented reality technology to bring the world alive in interactive 3D. Experience BETWEEN WORLDS in Augmented Reality now: http://www.experienceanomaly.com/between-worlds/demo

This book sets out cutting-edge new research and examines future prospects on 360-degree video, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) in journalism, analyzing and discussing virtual world experiments from a range of perspectives. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of scholars, Immersive Journalism as Storytelling highlights both the opportunities and the challenges presented by this form of storytelling. The book discusses how immersive journalism has the potential to reach new audiences, change the way stories are told, and provide more interactivity within the news industry. Aside from generating deeper emotional reactions and global perspectives, the book demonstrates how it can also diversify and upskill the news industry. Further contributions address the challenges, examining how immersive storytelling calls for reassessing issues of journalism ethics and truthfulness, transparency, privacy, manipulation, and surveillance, and questioning what it means to cover reality when a story is told in virtual reality. Chapters are grounded in empirical data such as content analyses and expert interviews, alongside insightful case studies that discuss Euronews, Nonny de la Peña’s Project Syria, and The New York Times’ NYTVR application. This book is written for journalism teachers, educators, and students, as well as scholars, politicians, lawmakers, and citizens with an interest in emerging technologies for media practice. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367713294, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Our understanding of the concept of narrative has undergone a significant transformation over time, particularly today as new communication technologies are developed and popularized. As new narrative genres are born and old ones undergo great change by the minute, a thorough understanding can shed light on which storytelling elements work best in what format. That deep understanding can then help build strong, satisfying stories. The Handbook of Research on Narrative Interactions is an essential publication that examines the relationships between types of narratives in a shifting and widening scope of storytelling forms. While highlighting a wide range of topics including contemporary culture, advertising, and transmedia storytelling, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, content creators, advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, academicians, and students.

Rethinking textuality, mimesis, and the cognitive processing of texts in light of new modes of artistic world construction. Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association of America Is there a significant difference between engagement with a game and engagement with a movie or novel? Can interactivity contribute to immersion, or is there a trade-off between the immersive “world” aspect of texts and their interactive “game” dimension? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, the questions raised by the new interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Ryan applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of narrative experience that encompasses reading, watching, and playing. The book weighs traditional literary narratives against the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past thirty years, including hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive drama, digital installation art, computer games, and multi-user online worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. In this completely revised edition, Ryan reflects on the developments that have taken place over the past fifteen years in terms of both theory and practice and focuses on the increase of narrativity in video games and its corresponding loss in experimental digital literature. Following the cognitive approaches that have rehabilitated immersion as the product of fundamental processes of world-construction and mental simulation, she details the many forms that interactivity has taken—or hopes to take—in digital texts, from determining the presentation of signs to affecting the level of story.