Amplified Publishing Category
On telling stories with VR and AR
by Agnieszka Przybyszewska
As an academic fellow I have presented (and will present soon) outputs of my research as presentations at conferences and symposiums and as academic papers published in peer-reviewed journals and joint publications. Being a fellow on Amplified Publishing gave me an opportunity to collect material that I am using now in academic papers that will be published in peer-reviewed journals this and next year. Parts of this research have been presented in the form of conference papers. I have presented my paper “VR (and) literature (and audience)“ at MIX Amplified Publishing conference in July 2021 and I have also been a panel member on an Amplified Publishing panel at an Immersive Storytelling Symposium in November 2021. This year I will be presenting my paper, “An (im)possible romance between VR/AR and literature: how to bring readers to the metaverse” within the Amplified Publishing panel at the annual ELO conference in May/June 2022.
Being part of the Amplified Publishing Pathfinder gave me an amazing opportunity to work closer with artists and audiences and revise my research methodology. I had opportunities to interview people working in the field of VR/AR literature as artists and producers and to chat with academics involved in practice-based research projects focused on VR and literature. I witnessed how artistic projects involving new technologies evolve, observing the evolution of artists’ concepts. All of that made me think also about sharing my research with non-academic communities.
As one of the editors of “The Writing Platform” I had the pleasure of curating the whole issue focused on storytelling in VR and AR. The first article of the issue was published in March 2022 and consequent papers will be published on The Writing Platform website till mid-summer. Papers are divided into three thematics blocks, one of which is focused on VR/AR and literature. On this platform, you can also read my interview about creating poetry in VR and VR literature with Weronika Lewandowska, the co-author of “VR Nightsss”
I also had the pleasure to give some lectures on VR/AR storytelling and its contexts for PG students of Creative Computing at Bath Spa University during a course on Digital Storytelling. With David Webb we supervised their first AR projects, some of them being amazing AR concrete poetry to experience in the real space.