Story Telling in Extended Reality

It's January 31st in 2018 and I am just feeling settled after a busy 3 months of traveling and making art. This is my first published blog entry on my brand new site. I'm using Squarespace and mostly uploading images taken within VR and it's an incredibly easy process. Shoots, with 3 clicks I can record my experience and share it on YouTube. I'm feeling powerful and blessed. I know well enough that everything can change at any given moment, so I am thankful that TODAY, that my family is healthy and happy. I recognize that this is temporary and I deeply respect the gravity of that. Yet there was a time when I didn't, it was my late teenage years and I really didn't care about caring. I don't think for one second that I'm alone in this and in my case, a number of hard learned lessons brought back to life my 'inner child', minus largely the naivety.

In my podcasts I often talk about education and VR and thought about some radically fantastical time down the line where immersive VR experiences on an online playlist will out perform our traditional education system. After having spent the last week immersed in XR (extended realities) dialogue and experiences while in New York (I was there showcasing 'Big City Nights'), I've come to believe that immersive story telling may be a powerful alley on our journey towards that goal.

My brother in law has these amazing Russian fairy tales like Hansel and Greta, illustrated beautifully and inclusive of the darker details so often watered down in the current culture.  Today while walking home from school with my 4 year old son, he describes to me a scene from his day...he describes it very well and asks, "Did you see me do that?" to which I reply, "I did in my mind, just now as you described it." So it occurs to me that children, or at least my son and myself are very aware of our mind's eye which is why we both love stories.

So what if we create the 'fairy tales' of XR, where we can sharpen intrinsic intuition and teach a moral through immersive story telling? What if we could share our hard earned lessons in a way that is memorable with others?

The question then becomes, how do we get stories from those who are not content creators?  Can we have a platform to submit oral or written accounts of our tales and have an AI start creating a scene based on visual data from these accounts?

What are your thoughts on the potential of XR as an aid in character development?