"You'll Be Alice Adventuring in Wonderland!"Processes, Challenges, and Opportunities of Creating Animated Virtual Reality Stories

2025-02-12

AI Summary

This paper addresses the lack of systematic workflows and tool support for animated VR storytelling. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 creators, augmented by thematic coding and cross-case comparison, we identify ten recurrent stages—from ideation to audience evaluation—and nine domain-specific challenges, including absence of multi-element narrative references, lack of story integration tools, and insufficient audience feedback mechanisms. We present the first end-to-end workflow framework for animated VR story creation, revealing fundamental distinctions between story-driven and visualization-driven workstyles. The study introduces a reusable process ontology and a taxonomy of challenges, grounded in empirical evidence. From these findings, we derive six key directions for future research—spanning authoring tool design, real-time narrative adaptation, and human-AI co-creation—thereby providing both empirical foundations and theoretical grounding for advancing VR narrative systems and human-computer collaborative design.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Animated virtual reality (VR) stories, combining the presence of VR and the artistry of computer animation, offer a compelling way to deliver messages and evoke emotions. Motivated by the growing demand for immersive narrative experiences, more creators are creating animated VR stories. However, a holistic understanding of their creation processes and challenges involved in crafting these stories is still limited. Based on semi-structured interviews with 21 animated VR story creators, we identify ten common stages in their end-to-end creation processes, ranging from idea generation to evaluation, which form diverse workflows that are story-driven or visual-driven. Additionally, we highlight nine unique issues that arise during the creation process, such as a lack of reference material for multi-element plots, the absence of specific functionalities for story integration, and inadequate support for audience evaluation. We compare the creation of animated VR stories to general XR applications and distill several future research opportunities.

Problem

• Understanding animated VR story creation processes
• Identifying challenges in crafting immersive narratives
• Exploring future research opportunities in VR storytelling

Innovation

• Animated VR story creation
• End-to-end process stages
• Unique creation challenges