What benefits can be expected when Virtual Reality enters Entertainment beyond of gaming?
Virtual Reality in Entertainment
Many of the following areas belong into the category ‘edutainment’ in which the aim is to educate as well as entertain.
- Virtual Museums, e.g. interactive exhibitions
- Galleries
- Theatre, e.g. interactive performances
- Virtual theme parks, e.g. accessing paranormal and supernatural characters
- Discovery centres
- Taking part in complex music VR experiences, e.g. to be a singer or a musician or a listener
- Historical reconstructions visiting
- Simulating visceral experiences such as VR flight simulators or smell and sound experiences
- Full immersion in cinema action using visual, aural and haptic interfaces
- Reproducing exotic travel daydreams and extra terrestrial space floats
- Experience the beauty of nature or distant and inaccessible locations
- Exploring immersive 360 videos and photos
- Collateral immersing into VR videos and experiences
- New experiences like “entering” Art, e.g. the Starry Night
Audience engagement
These environments enable the audience to tour through some of the most popular galleries (Example the the British Museum) and sometimes even allow members of the public to engage with the exhibits in ways which were previously forbidden or unknown.
School classes could enter historical building and walk through this, visiting different rooms to find out more about how people lived at that particular time in history. Maybe also interaction would be possible, to take over roles and replay or be part of momentous events like the Eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii or epic battles in the Scottish Highlands.
The unchained experience, away from just consuming into interacting, will lead into a new quality of entertainment and edutainment.
“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” Confucius, *551 BC. †479 BC.
