The imagined user journey

The booth at the festival is approximately 3x3 meters. Its walls are filled with paintings of tree trunks with a hint of green canopies on top. Coloured dots are seen behind the trunks. The floor is painted white with green-brown areas resembling wilted leaves. Green fabric is stretched out to form a roof, and bright light filters down through it. A peaceful sound design with some chirping birds fills the space and creates a melancholic but still inviting atmosphere. I get the impression that this experience will be friendly and is not out to scare me. 

A stool resembling a tree stump is placed in the middle of the room. On it lies a VR headset, two controllers and a tethered finger monitor. I am curious about the monitor. I have heard that the experience can be played at home without it as well, but I expect the finger monitor to make it more interesting. An assistant appears and helps me put on the equipment. I decide to sit down. She explains that I can glide through the experience by using the joysticks on the controllers or jump to areas that are visible to me with the teleportation feature. I can also grip objects.

As the experience loads, the same kind of stylized, two-dimensional drawing of trees form in a circle around me and text explaining the controllers appears. There is also text informing me that the experience will contain oral descriptions of abusive behaviour towards children and of wartime events. I hear the same sound design that was playing in the booth, but now with a low beat that reminds me of my heartbeat. I wonder whether this is my own pulse, and try to change it. The sound design responds. I become intrigued, thinking that my physical response will have an effect on the experience. 

The text dissolves. The two-dimensional drawings dissolve into a cloud of coloured dots swirling like clouds of mosquitos. The dots fill the space around me before merging into a new landscape. I am standing in front of a dense forest filled with tall trees. I turn around, but see only whiteness behind me. It is as if the forest is placed in a white laboratory. The trees are animated and three-dimensional, but look more like fantasy trees in a computer game than actual trees. The ground beneath the trees is filled with patches of short sandy grass, green-brown patches of what might be wilting leaves, and grey dots resembling pebbles and pathways. The background is white.

The coloured dots that I saw before the forest emerged are now swirling in-between the trees, forming distinct areas of different colours. I can hear atmospheric sound design coming from among the trees. Instead of chirping birds like before, I can now hear the flutter of wings and the occasional call of a crow. The forest seems mysterious, but is also colourful and inviting. I feel like exploring, and that I am about to enter a place that will challenge me.

There is an opening in the woods right in front of me, where there seems to be a path of grey pebbles. I push the joystick forward and see that faint footprints appear beneath me. They seem to be formed by invisible feet, creating impressions on the ground.When entering the forest, I feel engulfed by the sound design. I notice that the forest is quite dense, with shrubs and branches blocking my view. The path indicated below my feet branches in several directions. One of the crows I've heard flies towards me and sits down on a branch close by. It cocks its head, looks at me, and then begins to speak.  “Wondering where to go?”, it says, and it seems to be waiting. I decide to turn left. The bird flies over my head to the left and disappears into the foliage. I hear a change in the sound design and see that the orange dots swirling around me are becoming denser. I move forward until I arrive in a clearing, with the orange dots forming a kind of circle around me. Some personal belongings lie in the grass. I pick them up. This action triggers a voice over and animation that introduces the character of a soldier and father. While I listen, the crow returns and sits on the grass. It looks at me questioningly. When the narration is over, it says “Did you expect this? What do you think?” I drop the object and look around, seeing several different coloured clouds through the trees. The bird flies towards one of them. I decide to go in a different direction. The bird follows me, saying “oh, don’t you trust me?” We move through the forest like this, the bird indicating where to go and me occasionally following. I explore areas, with the crow commenting and asking questions. When I have visited all the different areas, I end up back where I started.  

The scene with the forest dissolves in the opposite way to the way it formed and I find myself back in the space where the experience started. 

I remove the VR headset. She also hands me a card with a QR code that leads to The Children Born of War Project and the opportunity to sign and share a petition to the UN to make protection of CBOW part of all peace-making negotiations and to ensure that children get their mother’s national citizenship.

Strength and weaknesses

“The forest” aims to give the participant agency and a meaningful user journey. It attempts to present various aspects of the reality for CBOW while stimulating the participant’s reflection and giving them the sense that their presence is important.

In the experience, the navigational choices of the participant are what decides the order in which the situations of the various characters are presented. This responsiveness lessens the danger that an order imposed by the creator would influence the impression the participant gets of each character. The agency of choosing how to interact with the material also gives the participant more control and is intended to create the feeling that the experience respects and invites the participant to reflect and make up their own mind.

The responsive surroundings and biometric input are meant to motivate and make the participant feel that their presence is important. It is however a weakness that the biometric feedback is only used to reflect the data collected from the participant in an audio-visual way and not used for more meaningful feedback. In 2019, at the time of this concept’s development process, it was also becoming apparent that sweat monitoring on the finger would probably not be feasible due to cost and complexity. The readings would also be affected by many different sources, like the temperature of the room, potential excitement by being new to VR, etc. The data would therefore only be able to demonstrate that the participant’s physical presence was recognized in the environment, but not give a reliable representation of the participant’s emotional reaction to the experience. The complexity would not warrant the limited result.

Although the element of the crow companion can increase the level of reflection for the participant, this character also seems under-utilized. Without offering the participant a way to respond to the crow, the relationship would be one-sided. The idea of exploring how the participant responds to being challenged with a relationship warrants further exploration.

An important challenge for “The Forest” is the representation of the various characters in the clearings. The previous concept of “The Meeting” was discarded in part because it included too many concrete details that could remove the focus from the children’s situations. Although “The Forest” does not visually portray these characters (thereby avoiding the depiction of physical features or clothing), recorded interviews with people would betray accents and contain details of specific conflicts that might trigger preconceptions or hidden biases in the participants. Animated cut-scenes would be expensive. It was also difficult to find objects connected with the characters that wouldn’t have signalled some cultural and/or geographical background. Take for instance the clearing for the father/soldier. It could maybe contain a backpack and other personal belongings that would trigger content when picked up. But even something as simple as a water bottle or flask would give cultural and geographical associations.

Different objects might have a specific look that might make the participant’s thoughts wander. Maybe the participant once had a similar flask? The participant’s distraction would dilute the emotional core of the experience. Keeping a participant’s attention on the content and themes central to the creator is a well-known challenge for VR experiences. All details unnecessary for communicating the core of the experience are at risk of derailing the attention of the participant — and thus also much diminishing the emotional intensity.  

The material presenting the characters would also be in a linear narrative form without meaningful interaction. Again, this felt like a missed opportunity to make the content feel personal.

The concept for “The Forest” ended up resembling many VR pieces that feel more like exhibitions, where material is presented and the experience pre-supposes that the participant is motivated to explore, interact and consume everything. But this motivation can not be taken for granted. In contrast, computer games are very good at creating motivation through gameplay, making an experience a quest with challenges that need to be explored and conquered. Game designers know that the success of a gaming experience lies in catching and holding a player’s attention, ensuring continued interest with various gameplay techniques. 

“The Forest” does not explore the possibility for a game-like experience, and the lack of meaningful challenges for the participant feels like a missed opportunity to properly pull the participant into the topic. This is especially the case here because the topic - the challenges for CBOW – concerns itself with the way people choose to objectify and label them. This objectification is part of the gaze that this artistic research project explores. It seems a pity to present this topic without challenging the participant to explore the way they themselves relate to others.

The concept was abandoned due to the problems of presenting specific documentary content and the lack of motivating gameplay and challenges that would demonstrate the plight of CBOW in a more interactive and efficient way.