Tech
Immersive narratives: how VR transforms industries through storytelling | Computer Weekly
Virtual reality (VR) has already seen many commercial and industrial uses. Yet VR also can be one of the most powerful tools for storytelling, visualising ideas and enhancing narratives – most obviously in the arts and entertainment sphere, where VR brings enhanced capabilities and enables artists to indulge in experiments to try out new approaches.
Other storytelling uses support societal causes, enable new judicial procedures, boost education and become emphatic conduits. Simply, VR can put storytelling in a higher gear.
Showing how VR enables new storytelling avenues and approaches for artists and entertainers, artist Charlotte Mikkelborg noticed the transformative power VR could unleash for narratives when she first tried on a VR headset in 2015: “I realised that I didn’t have to just watch a scene, I could live it.”
Since then, she has created an immersive concert for Coldplay; a multisensory narrative game; and Adventure, her series for Apple that portrays extreme athletes in VR.
Meanwhile, artist Estella Tse “merges tech and visual storytelling into a new art form”, adding: “The immersive nature of VR metaphorically and literally puts the viewer into a different world. The brain feels like it is transported to another place.” In contrast to Mikkelborg’s VR experiences, Tse’s stories resemble art installations rather than narratives.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the annual Venice Film Festival features an entire section related to the emerging artform. Venice Immersive “is entirely devoted to immersive media and includes all XR means of creative expression”. Eligible for submission are all immersive videos, VR, MR, AR and XR works of any length, including installations and virtual worlds. A review by the Guardian describes 2025’s selection as a “flourishing lineup of immersive storytelling experiments, [which] are taking visitors into novels, nightclubs and outer space”.
At the 82nd Venice Film Festival in August and September 2025, the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio featured a wide range of XR artwork that invited audience members to immerse themselves into stories rather than just looking onto them. For example, The Time Before is “a virtual reality journey through memory, imagination and dreams”, which steps into the main character’s mind to explore the imaginary worlds his sister builds to protect them from the anger of their father. The piece 1968 is “communal VR theatre that explores the transformative power of protest through illusions to 1968, which was a year charged by societal, political and cultural unrest”.
Venice Immersive Jury chair Eliza McNitt sees XR as “the beginning of a revolution … [artists can] push the boundaries of storytelling”.
Conveying societal causes
The way VR can bring stories and narratives closer to an audience lends itself to highlight social and societal issues in more impactful ways than previously possible. Journalist Becca Warner outlined her experience with VR content created by South African Habitat XR. The company’s objective is to create “immersive nature storytelling that drives public engagement, education, fundraising and conservation outcomes.”
Warner watched A Predicament of Pangolins, an immersive story featuring two wild pangolins in the Kalahari Desert who are facing the challenges of climate change. The anthropomorphised animals are created “for maximum empathy and cognitive connection to the present reality of climate change”. Warner highlights VR’s impact: “A virtual reality pangolin made me cry and care more about the planet: is this the real power of VR headsets?”
Exploring how humans live with nature is a common theme. French company Wild Immersion is “dedicated to raising awareness of environmental issues through 360° films, VR experiences, AR journeys, wildlife encyclopaedias and interactive drawings”. And the British artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast is using stories in immersive experiences and XR that are “designed to carve out space to expose, explore and expand our relationship with the living world”.
The UK’s Natural History Museum uses VR headsets to look a century into the future to visualise humans’ impact on nature. The showcase’s main takeaway is that “the actions we take today will help build a better tomorrow.”
Alex Burch, director of public programmes at the museum, explains that the immersive story shows “the aftermath of centuries of human industrial activity as well as to the interventions we have introduced to remedy our unsustainable activity”.
New York artist Sam Wolson uses VR to tell political narratives. For instance, Re-educated puts viewers into a Chinese re-education camp to convey the experience of prisoners, with first-hand testimony informing the animation. And No Place at Home follows a mother and her transgender teenager on their search for gender-affirming care, combining photorealistic three-dimensional imagery.
Wolson explains where VR can improve storytelling: “With virtual reality and interactive visual features, it comes down to whether a story is suited to multimedia or nonlinear narratives, in which the viewer can be placed directly into a story with the freedom to move around.”
Recovering memories, creating experiences
A less-known and emerging use of VR is visualising memories to resurrect past experiences. For instance, in December 2024, judge Andrew Siegel of Florida’s Broward County Circuit Court used a VR headset to a recreate the imagery of an aggravated assault. The defence hired an expert to visualise the defendant’s perspective in a stand-your ground trial.
Previous research at the University of South Australia indicated that test subjects showed improvements in spatial recall, “remembering the correct placement of evidence items”, and some aspects of narrative recall when using VR in comparison to the use of still imagery.
The approach offers benefits when crime-site visits are difficult or dangerous, contextual information plays an important role, or interactions among individuals are complicated to follow. Louisiana Fifth Circuit Court judge Scott Schlegel, who investigates new technologies for legal applications, points to a potential drawback. Virtual reality recreations “may powerfully convey emotions and perspective; it may be less reliable for conveying specific factual details that are crucial in legal proceedings.” In other words, emotions might cloud or even bias factual judgement.
Other applications for recreating memories exist. Researcher Rob Martin at South Carolina’s Clemson University employs VR so that hospice patients can have an experience they always wanted to have. After taking a survey of local patients, he found that most wanted to experience one more Clemson football game. With the help of the Clemson’s Tandem VR team, Martin created such a visualisation.
Tandem VR is a part of Clemson’s Virtual Reality and Nature Lab. The lab’s director Olivia McAnirlin developed a concept that allows users to share a VR experience “in tandem”. The “experiences are synchronised (simultaneous) so they can fully enjoy them together, personalised to their preferences based on their experiences, dreams or memories”.
Informing education
Storytelling is set to play a bigger role in tomorrow’s teaching and learning, and XR can transform education though new ways to bring stories alive. Eli Joseph at Columbia University School in New York believes that the merging of literature and technology “transforms storytelling from a linear into an interactive experience in which the reader’s choices can influence the narrative”.
Joseph notes that readers can immerse themselves in stories by addressing multiple senses, and that multisensory environments for genuinely immersive experiences enables users to take a closer look at ways how XR can create layers of experiences. Joseph also believes that the technology can benefit text books – for instance, by visualising dissection of cells in biology class.
VR not only can create narratives but also tell stories from the past. For example, the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s Experience360 is using VR to make history palpable. The Chicago museum uses the technology “to witness stories of survival, ask questions and reflect on the past in ways that inspire empathy, respect and hope”.
Other institutions have taken note. The Centreville Regional Library in Fairfax, Virginia, partnered with the Illinois Holocaust Museum. Luis Aponte, an information services librarian who brought the experience to Centreville, praises “the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s dedication to preserving history in a way that transforms the future”.
Eliciting empathy
Educational use of VR can deepen the experience by eliciting empathy for history’s protagonists and witnesses. In a study by Stanford University, researchers looked at the effect VR can have to “reduce psychological distance to locations affected by climate change, influencing climate emotions and risk perceptions”.
One group of test subjects were only listening to news broadcasts about flooding in selected locations due to climate change while other participants were virtually flying through a three-dimensional representation of the floodings. Participants that experienced the virtualisation became concerned about climate change.
“Utilising VR for climate education can enhance awareness and inspire constructive actions, moving beyond traditional fear-driven narratives,” said the study.
VR can also elevate emotional participation. In 2015, musician Björk released the album Vulnicura, which deals with her emotional breakup of a long-time relationship. She recently worked with Pulse Jet Studios to create a VR visualisation of the songs. Björk explained her motivation: “I realised that I’d written a whole heartbreak album … what most people were complaining about with VR is it was very isolating.”
The VR journey starts in an austere landscape of Iceland, where Björk hails from. Users then can thread together Björk’s broken heart. Her initial VR art was released shortly after the album’s release, but over time she frequently updated the storytelling as VR become more powerful and capable, resulting in the most recent 2025 version.
And this takes the conversation back to arts and entertainment. VR’s impact on storytelling can affect many applications areas across industries, sometimes in surprising ways. Over time immersive capabilities will become an expectation rather than a surprise when experiencing stories and narratives across various types of content.
Martin Schwirn is the author of ‘Small data, big disruptions: How to spot signals of change and manage uncertainty’ (ISBN 9781632651921). Schwirn has advised companies internationally for SRI International and Business Finland. He is a strategy and innovation consultant for Global 2000 companies.