EntangleVR++: Evaluating the Potential of using Entanglement in an Interactive VR Scene Creation System

TL;DR

This work evaluated how well the idea of entanglement enables creators to easily and quickly design interactive Virtual reality narratives and derived four authoring strategies for tool designers interested in the design of future visual interface for interactively creating virtual scenes that include relational objects and multiple outcomes driven by player interactions.

Abstract

Interactive digital stories provide a sense of flexibility and freedom to players by allowing them to make choices at key junctions. These choices advance the narrative and determine, to some degree, how the story evolves for that player. As shown in prior work, the ability to control or participate in the construction of the narrative can give the player a high level of agency that results in a stronger sense of immersion in the narrative experience. To support the design of this type of interactive storytelling, our system, EntangleVR++, borrows the idea of entanglement from quantum computing. Our use of entanglement allows creators and storytellers control over which sequences of story events take place in correlation with each other, initiated by the choices a player makes. In this work, we evaluated how well our idea of entanglement enables creators to easily and quickly design interactive VR narratives. We asked 16 participants to use our system and based on user interviews, analyses of screen recordings, and questionnaire feedback, we extracted four themes. From these themes and the study overall, we derived four authoring strategies for tool designers interested in the design of future visual interface for interactively creating virtual scenes that include relational objects and multiple outcomes driven by player interactions.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: An example interactive VR scene with different possible outcomes that depend on the player's interactions with the scene elements. The scene shown is composed using EntangleVR++'s visual interface. Left: (a) the initial scene state that a player sees before interacting with any elements. Three interaction options and resulting story pathways are available where a flower (i) turns into a virus when touched by the player; a man in black (ii) is saved from becoming a zombie if the player chooses to visit him before exposing the virus hidden in the flower; and a wolf pack (iii) is affected by the player's interactions with either the flower or the man in black, turning them into zombies. Middle: (b) the player chooses to touch the flower which unveils a hidden virus (i), causing the man in black (ii) and the wolf pack (iii) to turn into zombies immediately. Right: (c) the player chooses to interact with the man in black first which save this character from becoming a zombie (ii) but still turns the wolf pack into zombies (iii). In (c), the player interacts with the flower (i) and discovers the virus behind the zombies.
• Figure 2: This figure shows EntangleVR++'s visual interface with quantum computing inspired nodes for interactive VR scene creation: (i) is a qubit node that lets the creator define initial probability amplitudes represented by a Bloch Sphere 1946bloch. (ii) is a quantum gate node that modifies the input qubit's state. (iii) is a super object node that take the input qubit value as a driving probability for its two possible object states. (iv) is an interactive preview window that shows a mini-map of all the virtual objects created in the scene in real-time and the creator can directly view and test the interaction outcomes by clicking on the appropriate interactable objects.
• Figure 3: An example of how to build entangled relationships between three super objects in EntangleVR++. Left: (a) shows three different super objects (X), (Y), (Z) that are defined with individual input qubits and object states, and are linked with entanglers. Right: (b) shows a detailed explanation of how the graph in (a) enables the user to achieve different outcomes based on interactions with X, Y and Z.
• Figure 4: Visual results from Task 2 where participants were asked to create an interactive scene with two different outcomes based on player interaction. Left: (a) shows the initial scene state that has two target objects, an apple and a flower, as described in the task description given to the participants. Middle: (b) shows one outcome if the player chooses to interact with the apple that causes a deer to walk out from behind the trees and eat the flower. Right: (c) shows another outcome if the player chooses to pick up the flower first which causes a zombie to walk out from behind the lunar module and eat the apple. Outcomes (b) and (c) were created by the participants using entangled relationships between these objects (apple, flower, zombie, deer), resulting in a scenario where the apple and the flower cannot be taken by the player at the same time.