Exploring the usability of immersive interactive storytelling

Abstract

The Entertainment potential of Virtual Reality is yet to be fully realised.In recent years, this potential has been described through the Holodeck™ metaphor, without however addressing the issue of content creation and gameplay.Recent progress in Interactive Narrative technology makes it possible to envision immersive systems.Yet, little is known about the usability of such systems or which paradigms should be adopted for gameplay and interaction.We report user experiments carried out with a fully immersive Interactive Narrative system based on a CAVE-like system, which explore two interactivity paradigms for user involvement (Actor and Ghost).Our results confirm the potential of immersive Interactive Narratives in terms of performance but also of user acceptance.