Chapter 21 - Volumetric video as a novel medium for creative storytelling

Abstract

Volumetric video (VV) is a media format that represents three-dimensional content for playback via traditional flat screens, 3D displays, and emergent extended-reality (XR) platforms, such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). This type of volumography has numerous public-facing cultural applications within the creative technology domain and promises many advantages over conventional storytelling media. Though many content creation approaches can call upon a long-established history of traditional storytelling techniques, the capture and creation of VV content and its representation with the XR space levels presents fundamentally new challenges that demand a redesigning of a storytelling grammar. This chapter discusses VV's application in creative experiments, explicitly outlining the V-SENSE project's innovative contributions to XR content creation. In this way, we explore VV as a novel medium for creative storytelling, providing example use-cases and real-world context for VV in practice. Our results demonstrate some successes and shortcomings of applications of VV in public-facing forums and reflective user-centered analyses. Ultimately, this chapter analyzes the V-SENSE project's most complete VV productions and critically reflects upon case-study examples within the creative domain. Furthermore, it is expected that by reflecting upon the presented work, we can contribute to the establishment of a new XR storytelling grammar that will help provide solid foundations for other more sophisticated VV productions in the future.