I have stared too long!
A sort-of-reflection of Henrikson, R., Araujo, B., Chevalier, F., Singh, K., & Balakrishnan, R. (2016, October). Multi-device storyboards for cinematic narratives in VR. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 787-796). ACM.
Disclaimer: I have limited experience of using VR (certainly not more than 3 minutes). I have never worked on any VR system
Summary:
This paper presents a sleuth of design interventions to support VR story creation. The paper takes an exploratory approach to understand the needs and goals of VR professionals, and then proposes design ideas that are posited to help in the VR story creation. The formative study highlighted several limitations of the current tools and contrasted goals of VR stories to that targeted for silver-screen. The proposed design changes involve pairing a head-mount and a tablet so that it facilitates several configurations of collaboration, and facilitates activities such as storyboard creation. It also elicited short user feedback from professionals.
My reflection:
First and foremost, I am overwhelmed reading this paper. This may be the first time I had wished that the authors had known about (and followed to achieve) a minimal-publishing unit (MPU). There are just too many things: an exploratory study and its findings, proposal of a working prototype, and a user-study. I see at least two paper (those who have mastered MPUs would probably see 3 or 4!).
In the need to writing everything within 10 pages, I felt that the paper left out the details. Beauty, and to academics, knowledge, lies in those details. For example, I loved the contrast with silver-screen movies (or stage plays) and it helped me understand the kinds of problems and constraints directors face while creating VR experiences. However, the paper does not discuss how those constraints and problems have influenced current practices. Similarly, the paper asserts that they discarded a correction for a problem that they themselves say is “one of the main challenges” [pp. 791]. The reason for discarding is asserted that in practice such a thing is not neeeded. However, without any evidence to support the claims (such as data from earlier work or their own observation of a large number of practicing artists), the assertion feels weak.
It may be my limited understanding of VR systems but I am confused about the paper’s assertion that, “the artist can look at their creation on the HMD [the VR headmount] and keep editing the content on the tablet”. VR headsets remove any way of realizing the surrounding environment so it is confusing how the paper believes that an artist could work on their tablet. In Figure 9 (the left-most image) shows an outline of the tablet which is asserted as to help the artist to draw. However, the relative position of the hand and the tablet will unknown to the immersed artist, so wouldn’t that be a problem?
The user feedback felt very limited too. For example, P2 suggested to add a feature to “toggle to-scale silhouettes of an ‘apple, person, and dinosaur'”. What does this imply? Does this imply that the design lacked a way to evaluate scale of objects in the immersed environment? Or is it because of some concerns in understanding lighting and object-shadows (a typical architect’s worry)? Or is it something else? Again, it could be something very typical to ask in a VR environment but for a novice like me, it felt like the authors were not delving in the details to draw out knowledge-nuggests for fellow VR designers.
Had I been a reviewer, I would have suggested the authors to merge the section that discusses Planning for VR stories (Previs, Storyboards) with the Related Work section. That would save space which probably would have helped the authors to reflect more on their work and add details. 3 years later, it would have helped me write a less-critical reflection too.
Having said that, I also realize that I have been so attuned to a way of thinking about design research that I vehemently resist anything that deviates from the pattern. I spent my entire day reading and re-reading these two papers but I still have not been able to break my resistance. To me, this work symbolizes more of a “heroic design” approach i.e. designer makes certain assumptions of an environment, builds something based on those assumptions, presents it, and the design activity is done. The reality of design has to be more complicated than that – user’s goals and problems vary, understanding the nuanced problems could influence the proposed design, prototypes have multiple alternatives, and evaluations dive deeper to understand potential effects in use. I realize that these are my assumptions and that has made me write such a critical reflection. I apologize for that and I hope to learn and be open to the work.