more efficient and increase the sense of presence in the spectator when they
are simple, coherent and seem ‘natural’. In other words, the more difficult
the interface is, the more barriers we will find preventing our immersion in
the simulation of reality and our ability to forget the physical links of our
world. Indeed, the biggest obstacle that Virtual Reality finds today, in order
to engage with society and immerse consumers, is the development of its
interface. The devices are very present, very obvious; it is not easy to isolate
the mechanical elements from the perceptual and personal experience, and
this effect prohibits the virtual experience, making it impossible to avoid the
feeling that the environment is moving and not us.
However, the combination of the existing technologies of cinema and
interaction introduces the audience to the ability to influence the film and
create a different film, transforming, in this way, traditional understanding
of cinema. In this sense, experimental short films such as Textual @traction
(Morris, 2005) and Watch Me (Morris, 2007) produce an active interaction
between the film and the audience through SMS and Video Messages. Textual
@traction connects the audience to the film through SMSs that they receive
on their mobiles phones, sharing the information contained in the SMS of the
diegetic characters and extending the plot from the screen to the mobile
phones of the audiences. In Watch Me, the audience receives the first scene
of the film on their mobile phones in the form of a video message before
entering the cinema. They then watch the main body of the film in the
cinema until the penultimate scene, when the film pauses and the inter-title
‘to be concluded elsewhere’ appears on the screen. Thirty minutes after
leaving the cinema, the spectators receive the final scene on their phones. As
a form of ‘expanded cinema’ Watch Me combines two technologies to explore
new ways of telling stories and break the time and space traditionally
associated with cinema (Morris, 2008).
The question that surely arises from this point is: are Virtual Reality
and computer generated images the future of cinema? Will the old cinematic
concept of cinema be replaced by the mobility and control over the image of
the new media environment? The answer is probably not. The reflexivity, the
ability to transmit thoughts, experiences and feelings, the ‘active passivity’
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