Storytelling in WebVR – Chenyi's IDM Blogs

Prompt: The objective is to explore and convey the profound impact of music on people’s lives through WebVR storytelling. You will create an immersive, interactive experience that allows users to engage with the emotional and transformative aspects of music on Mozilla Hubs.

Preliminary Research (10/10/2023)

Music is often seen as a form of entertainment, but it is also a universal language that connects individuals and communities. Music has the unique power to influence people of all ages in multiple facets, shaping our personal experiences and the societies we live in.

Emotions: People can express emotions through music and music can also trigger emotions. There are 13 key emotions that music triggers in people across cultures: amusement, joy, eroticism, beauty, relaxation, sadness, dreaminess, triumph, tension, fear, annoyance, defiance, and high energy. The combination of different scales, tempos, and instrumentation can elicit specific feelings in the audience, and that’s how soundtracks work in films. Music with a fast pace tends to evoke excitement and joy, while slow, soothing music is calming and relaxing.

Memories: There’s neuroscience behind music as it is deeply rooted in our conscious and unconscious brains. Listening to and performing music reactivates areas of the brain associated with memory. Music can help retrieve stored memories as it triggers vivid memories of individuals and makes them recall specific events and feelings associated with it, which is also known as the “Proust effect”. According to some studies, music can also help us lay down new memories as it engages memory processing in our brain including the hippocampus.

Culture: Music can be considered as a database for storing shared knowledge, means of subsistence, and how to govern, which ensures the survival of a group. It helps communities express and preserve their traditions, values, and histories. There are many different musical genres and instruments which all represent different cultural identities. Music can also bring people with diverse backgrounds together as it helps people share emotions, promotes bonding, and provides a highway of shared experiences.

Story – Unforgettable Henry: An Alzheimer’s patient, Henry, became alive, singing along and sharing memories with music therapy.
Music helps animate, organize, and bring the sense of identity back to people who are “out of it”.

Conceptualization (10/16/2023)

According to my research from last week and my experience and observation, the concept for my WebVR story would be Memory and Perception.

The key theme I want to convey in my work is the special power of the music. I want to express how music relates to our brain as it can trigger specific emotions and memories, as well as how music can help bring a sense of identity to people and connect people.

I want to create a narrative about a person who is “out of it”, i.e. lost all memories and emotional perceptions, and the music around sort of helps animate and organize the person again.

Outline of my narrative structure (rough idea):

Background Setting: The user will act as the person in my story and will start in an enclosed space with void and silence (to represent the sense of loss)
Transition: Music will then be played to attract the user to go out of the starting place (to represent the person is open due to the music)
Interactions: There will be a series of different POIs along the way, the user can interact with each of them to play music and then collect a piece of emotion/memory from that corresponding music (to represent the person is gradually recovering memory and perception from the
music)
Transition: After interacting with all POIs and finishing collecting all emotional pieces, the user should see a larger and more colorful world and become alive again

WebVR Development (10/30/2023)

Story: A depressed person, who was trapped by inner loss, being animated and healed by music.

Environment: Enclosed spaces with spiral-shaped hallways mimic a maze, while outside the building is nature.

Expected Experience: The audience will play as the person in my narrative, start from the middle of the space, and have an immersive experience of going out of the building to nature.

Music Selection: I picked 5 songs by a Japanese artist, Kana Wakareno. I occasionally heard her music and at first, I felt sad, but as I listened to it I calmed down and felt healed, so I thought her music would be a good fit for my story as it can evoke different emotions.

Challenges: I struggled with how to build a 3D environment for my story at first because I had no experience in designing and building environments and I was afraid that I couldn’t translate my ideas into something visible. I also struggled with how to let the audience know what I was trying to convey during the process. I would like to leave some space for the audience to explore by themselves but don’t want them to get lost or confused. It was a little hard to find the balance between freedom and confusion, so I ended up adding some prompts and navigation in my world to help guide the audience through the story.