Emotionally Enhanced Memories with Virtual Reality:

Can stereoscopic Virtual Reality imagery be a “trigger”? This line of thinking and proposition comes from method acting as used in Film and Theater, known as Emotional memory and Emotional recall.

This is an acting technique of recalling the psychological or emotional response to a past event to evoke or invoke a stronger emotion during an actors performance. Many times, jogging the mind to recollect moments and memories associated with a specific object, known as the “release object”, is what triggers the desired emotional response called for by the Director during a performance; tears, for example.

Virtual Reality’s role in treating PTSD is well known for many years due to the strong immersion it allows when treating people.

For VR filmmakers, what is worth hypothesizing here is; could a subject, location or object, captured in look-around stereoscopic Virtual Reality be that “release object” for audiences watching a Cinematic VR movie?

i.e: could a scene in a VR movie of balloons at a kids party, trigger an emotional response in the audience remembering his/her childhood? Or, could a scene such as a funeral and graveyard when viewed via a VR headset, affording the wearer a close-up view of a cement or marble tombstone be the ‘release’ object that brings a flood of emotion to the viewer (if they have some repressed or forgotten memory of an unfortunate family loss.)

The real world, captured stereoscopically and presented in a Virtual Reality setting, even if in lower resolution, could have a larger emotional impact than a pure crisp CG recreation of the real world. – It comes down to the feeling of Deja Vu. The brain shuttling through it’s memory bank – synapses firing – perhaps helping to re-construct long faded visual memories.

Some VR purists believe Virtual Reality should only allow for true interactive experiences or at the very least, VR that let’s you “look around” objects. In the example cited above, it’s worth considering that a viewer might simply be too emotionally rooted in the scene to want to “look behind” a tombstone. Such is the power and purpose of narrative Cinematic Storytelling in Virtual reality.



(video credit: from the movie Minority Report. – Criticalcommons.org. All Copyrights acknowledged.)

The video clip above is from the movie Minority Report. A movie that has managed to blur the line between science fiction and reality in many areas.

In this part of the movie, we see what the possible effect could be, if someone was watching near holographic or Virtual Reality home video of loved ones, and soon, VR headsets with Digital See thru capability, would merge the virtual world with the real one. At the end of the clip, we see Tom Cruise looking out the window as rain pours and water drops hit the window pane.

As an example: for such a scene, the heavy rain could be thought of as the “trigger” for the actor (Cruise) while jogging his memory to recollect incidents he may have from moments in his real life, to bring a flood of emotions to enhance his performance.

Immersive VR; an emotional trigger for Audiences?

What we would like to hypothesize further is… Can a VR-3D scene itself be the “trigger” for audiences? In other words, can the feeling of “presence” – of being there- in Virtual Reality, trigger an emotional response in the viewer/audience that no 2D movie ever could?

Could a person, a location, or entire scene, captured in 360 VR, combined with positional surround sound, act as a trigger? Maybe bringing back memories of happiness and a romance of years ago, to members of the audience who may have strolled down a street in Paris…and maybe to others, memories of heartache, experienced on those very same streets?

The aim of movies is not always to re-create reality, but for the most part, Directors do want audiences to be immersed in the story unfolding, and if it has a profound personal effect on the audiences, that is what every storyteller strives for.

Cinematic VR captured in stereoscopic 3D, introduces a new medium for visual storytelling that was previously never available to Directors and Cinematographers.

As we work on our own in-house Cinematic VR novel, we’re continually finding the release date getting pushed for one reason: The desire to engineer emotions in audiences is making us take a closer look at how Stereoscopic surround visuals, along with foley (a very important aspect in HMD driven VR) and surround sound make the viewer suspend the feeling of disbelief.