Emotion, Awe, and the Sublime
The article we read for today's Startup Lab suggests that positive emotions are more effective than unpleasant ones in an immersive or interactive VR stroytelling experience when the creators want to change how their player/viewer (which I refer to as "your person") thinks, believes, or acts/behaves. Ann Searight Christiano writes:
In art, we call this overwhelming feeling "the sublime." The sublime is an experience of beauty, but one that is so big, so powerful, we feel small and insignificant in the face of it. Nature, in particular, evokes the sublime, with its grandeur, its total disinterest in whether we live or die or even exist, and its vast scope and duration. The Romantics were really into the sublime, because of the powerful flood of feelings connected to its experience. The sublime has both positive --inspiring! gorgeous! speechless! beyond human scale or understanding! challenging!--and negative aspects: overwhelming! bewildering! disturbing! so much bigger than us! will engulf us! insignificant in comparison!
In my opinion, we should design VR and other immersive experiences for awe, for the sublime. Particularly now, when VR is still novel, go for short, intense experiences. Stanford's VHIL Jeremy Bailenson recommends VR experiences of no more than 20 minutes. I personally stay in the headset for much longer when I am drawing or modeling in 3D, but I see his point. And as AR develops and VR/AR/MR converge into the XR continuum, let's make experiences that knock people's socks off, and maybe even have the effect of increasing what is so often called "empathy."
Spend some time with the interactive map referred to in Christiano's Medium post. It's fascinating.
Pleasant emotions often get overlooked in storytelling, but they can be extremely powerful. Scholars have long understood the power of awe, also known as the “overview effect.” This theory was first captured by writer Frank White after he interviewed 29 astronauts. He found that people who had seen the Earth from space, or who observed someone who had, were filled with a sense of awe that opened them to new perspectives and connection to humanity. More recently, psychologists have suggested that inspiring awe in your audience can open people up to new ideas, foster self reflection and increase altruism. (see: Science of Story Building: Use Emotion With Intention )
In art, we call this overwhelming feeling "the sublime." The sublime is an experience of beauty, but one that is so big, so powerful, we feel small and insignificant in the face of it. Nature, in particular, evokes the sublime, with its grandeur, its total disinterest in whether we live or die or even exist, and its vast scope and duration. The Romantics were really into the sublime, because of the powerful flood of feelings connected to its experience. The sublime has both positive --inspiring! gorgeous! speechless! beyond human scale or understanding! challenging!--and negative aspects: overwhelming! bewildering! disturbing! so much bigger than us! will engulf us! insignificant in comparison!
In my opinion, we should design VR and other immersive experiences for awe, for the sublime. Particularly now, when VR is still novel, go for short, intense experiences. Stanford's VHIL Jeremy Bailenson recommends VR experiences of no more than 20 minutes. I personally stay in the headset for much longer when I am drawing or modeling in 3D, but I see his point. And as AR develops and VR/AR/MR converge into the XR continuum, let's make experiences that knock people's socks off, and maybe even have the effect of increasing what is so often called "empathy."
Spend some time with the interactive map referred to in Christiano's Medium post. It's fascinating.
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