Coordinating attention and cooperation in multi-user virtual reality narratives

Limited research has been performed attempting to handle multiuser storytelling environments in virtual reality. As such, a number of questions about handling story progression and maintaining user presence in a multi-user virtual environment have yet to be answered. We created a multi-user virtual reality story experience in which we intend to study a set of guided camera techniques and a set of gaze distractor techniques to determine how best to attract disparate users to the same story. Additionally, we describe our preliminary work and plans to study the effectiveness of these techniques, their effect on user presence, and generally how multiple users feel their actions affect the outcome of a story.