Immersive storytelling in VR: designing the future of experience

As companies like Facebook, Google and Apple invested in virtual reality, designers faced a new question: how do you tell a story when the audience is standing inside it?

AIGA San Francisco brought together creative leads to explore what that shift means for the craft.

I joined creative leads from Google, Facebook, Unity and Magic Leap on the AIGA panel.

• Spoke on the designer’s role in emerging, spatial media.
• Shared lessons from my own work in storytelling, motion and spatial UX.
• Connected experiential design practice to the new medium.

• Presence over screens. Design for how a space feels, not just what a frame shows.
• Rethink narrative structure. In VR the viewer chooses where to look, so the story has to work from every angle.
• Adapt the workflow. Spatial work needs new ways to prototype, review and critique.

• Shared the stage with leaders from four of the companies defining the medium.
• The same thinking now shapes how I design for AI: people react to new technology emotionally first.

Listen to the full panel below.