Scripting the silhouette: Writing around the participant in interactive virtual reality experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the challenges and emerging understandings around crafting the narrative position of the participant in real-time virtual reality (VR). Drawing on interviews with contemporary VR creators working in the United Kingdom, America, Canada and Australia, the article explores the ways in which creators conceptualize the narrative space occupied by an interactive VR participant. It argues that contemporary creators are utilizing the narrative capacity of the participant in ways that challenge traditional notions of characterization and protagonist. Instead, creators engage methods and ideas that are more aligned with the notion of ‘postdramatic’ theatre. I propose that the concept of negative space can be used to explain the relationship between the active participant and authored VR work. Conceiving the space occupied by the embodied participant in terms of ‘negative space’ within the authored environment can allow screenwriters and VR creators to ‘write around’ this absent (but present) participant during the development process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".