Telling Stories through Space: The Mindstage Project

Mindstage is a real-time multi-user 3D virtual environment used to explore the relationships between a linear story and the virtual world in which it unfolds. The prototype uses as its narrative spine an illustrated lecture on film design by Christopher Hobbs. It provides a stage for interaction featuring a customized 3D environment based on this material, with the necessary actors and objects in it. The main design issues were mapping the linear talk onto the virtual space, and the implementation of various interactive features within it. We argue that a careful use of spatial design supports a degree of non-linear story-telling without compromising the core linear content.