How do you tell 360-degree stories? How do you tell stories with the Connected Home? What might it mean to be a virtual reality novelist?

Those were the primary research questions I set out to explore with The Lighthouse in the Woods, one of my main projects this past semester at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. The story had been kicking around in my head literally for years – I hoard story ideas, snippets, alternate versions and all that stuff deep in my hard drives, dated and location-stamped, so I can trace projects as they start, grow, languish, falter, flourish, and everything in between. For Lighthouse, the earliest file I have is dated July 7th, 2011, and location-stamped Bainbridge Island. It begins like this:

The lighthouse in the jungle had always been there, to hear my family tell it. It had always been there, and we had always been forbidden to set foot near it. It was our secret, nestled deep in the dense wood behind our family’s ancestral home and surrounded by pine trees so impossibly tall that they enclosed the lighthouse completely. Its tip was not visible from the road, nor even from planes – my uncle Roderick once chartered a small Cessna to fly overhead just to check on it himself, and he returned jolly and satisfied that the lighthouse was safe from prying eyes in all directions.

Or so we thought.

—

Of course the children of the family were the most inquisitive, about the origins of the lighthouse, the contents of the lighthouse, and why we couldn’t tell anyone about it.

“After all,” my cousin Clarise pointed out in her sniffy, uppity tone on the day of the Fall. “It’s a lighthouse in the middle of a forest. This makes no sense at all. Why would anyone build a lighthouse where no one could see it, and with no water nearby?”

My grandfather stared at her with his sharp hazel eyes, peering out from under his shock of dirty white hair that never seemed to come clean no matter how hard his servants seemed to scrub at it. He was a twisted man in nearly every sense of the word – his frame had been wracked with some dark, degenerative disease that slowly knotted his spine and limbs into gnarled angles and curves, his arms so badly warped now that if he were to hold both arms out straight in front of him the veiny backs of each palsied hand would be facing one another – but his mind and his tongue, mercifully or cruelly depending on how you looked at it, remained clear and straight and true. “My dear Clarise,” he said in his strong, honey-smooth voice, “who are you to decide what makes sense and what does not? You do not know everything, and be grateful that you do not. You do not know the hearts and minds of the builders. You do not know if there was ever water here…”

Clarise pounced. “But Grandfather,” she said smugly, cutting him off with a wave of her hand, “I do know there was never water here. I did a project at school where we were told to research a subject at the City Hall. I chose to look up the history of this area’s geography, and there was never any water here.”

Grandfather’s eyes twinkled. “That they know of.”

“No, Grandfather,” Clarise said sternly. “There was never any water here, ever. They did a study. They studied the minerals in the ground, they studied the makeup of the soil. There was never any water here.”

Grandfather was silent for a moment. It was our turn to stare at him, while Clarise lifted her chin with a proud, defiant, nasty little smile and folded her arms across her chest, where her bosom was just starting to swell. There were eight of us in Grandfather’s parlor that day, the sun-dappled and walnut-paneled study in the back of the mansion where Grandfather kept his books and his notes and his cigarillos and his whiskey. Grandfather sat in the cracked leather armchair he’d always held court in, a worn quilted blanket draped over his gnarled legs, one hand tapping an irregular, uncontrollable staccato while the other cupped his chin in thought.

Circled around him were the seven of us that called ourselves his grandchildren, six of us on footstools or cushions or mismatched chairs or the floor, with Clarise seated directly opposite Grandfather in a stiff-backed wooden chair, which was fitting. She wore a prim red gingham dress, which her mother had almost certainly purchased from an expensive boutique specifically for this visit, complete with a matching red gingham bow in her raven black hair and shiny black patent leather shoes with equally shiny gold buckles, which in turn matched the golden flower bracelet that encircled her left wrist. The rest of us grandchildren were dressed nicely, to be sure – one didn’t come to visit Grandfather in t-shirts and sneakers – but none of the rest of us placed as much stock in appearances and glamour as Clarise and her parents. Will, the second oldest behind Clarise, wore khakis and a polo shirt with a New York Yankees logo embroidered on the breast; chubby third-oldest Teddy sat on the floor beside Will in slacks and a pink Oxford shirt that strained at its seams; artsy fourth-oldest Annie sat beside Teddy fiddling with the constantly-evolving charm bracelet she wore on her right wrist and occasionally stealing glances out the windows; I sat beside Anne in my best jeans and a black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, trying to split my attention between watching the battle of wills between Clarise and Grandfather and ensuring that the twins, little Abby and Agnes, didn’t put anything inappropriate in their mouths. I tried not to smile at the strange symmetry of the youngest cousins being endangered by the wrong things going into their mouths, and the oldest being endangered by the wrong things coming out of hers.

Grandfather cleared his throat. “My dear, you are very smart. But you are also very stupid.”

Clarise started. “I -”

He cut her off. “Not all truths are to be found in records, nor in science, and especially not in the halls of politicians. Where is here, after all? Is here the soil beneath our feet? Is it the sky above our heads? Is it the rough amalgamation of atoms that make up these trees, these chairs, or these hands? And most of all, what is never? We know that this entire country was once covered in ice, and water before that.”

“But Grandfather,” Clarise protested. “Surely you can’t be saying that the lighthouse is older than -”

“Be silent, girl,” Grandfather snapped, his tone suddenly harsh. “I am saying that there are great many things you do not know. One of them apparently being our First Law: that you do not talk of the Lighthouse to anyone outside this family, and you do not do anything that might call attention to it. Especially school projects in City Halls!”

The turn in the atmosphere was abrupt and astonishing. My grandfather’s warm voice had been instantly replaced by something haggard and dangerous and feral, his tapping fingers now gripping the arm of his chair so fiercely that they strained the leather, his sparkling eyes now flashing and cruel.

The change in Clarise was equally abrupt. The haughtiness was gone, the prideful sneer replaced by a horrified little ‘o’. Her face was nearly the same perfect white as that now showing all the way around her blue irises. I had never seen Clarise terrified before now, but in three sentences Grandfather had shredded her pretentious mask and revealed the coward beneath. Worse, he wasn’t finished.

Draped over the arm of Grandfather’s chair was a wire with a push-button, which he now seized between his thumb and forefinger. Instantly the door to the parlor swung open and Christopher, Grandfather’s personal assistant and chief valet, appeared. “Yes, Mister Lux?”

Grandfather pointed at Clarise. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “Take this one to her parents and tell them to leave at once. Her actions have endangered our family and she has no respect for our laws, our traditions, or for me. Until they have taught her such respect, ideally with the liberal application of switches, neither she nor they are welcome on my land.”

In a blink, Christopher was beside Clarise, seizing her shoulder and lifting her forcefully out of the chair. He spoke not a word to acknowledge either Grandfather’s order or Clarise’s sudden screeching, sobbing and wailing. Her cries were only audible for a moment as Christopher steered her across the floor of the parlor, then the door slammed shut behind them and the room fell abruptly silent.

The rest of us stared at Grandfather. I don’t think I had ever known fear before that point, not really. There had been plenty of times when my own father had punished me for doing dumb things, like breaking one of my mother’s good china plates when running through the house or for trying out one of the swear words I’d learned from a friend when he was within earshot, but nothing compared to what Grandfather had done to Clarise – and by extension Aunt Clarissa and Uncle Ethan – in only a few seconds. Which, ironically, was about as long as the awkward silence in the parlor lasted until both Abby and Agnes began to cry. I picked up Agnes and began to comfort her while Anne did the same for Abby, but they were unconsolable. Their wailing extinguished the fury that had bloomed in Grandfather, and he suddenly sagged in his chair like a man deflated, his palsied tapping now reduced to a ragged twitch and his other gnarled hand covering his eyes as he dropped his chin to his chest. Teddy moved to speak, but Will, always much too wise for his age, placed a hand on his shoulder and shook his head.

We sat there for a long minute like that, two of us crying loudly and the rest of us likely wishing we could do the same, and then the parlor door burst open again. Through it flowed a flood of people – first Christopher, his face flushed and his mouth working silently, and then a rush of aunts and uncles. I was about to heave a sigh of relief and hand Agnes over to her mother when Christopher’s mouth finally regained its function.

“The girl broke free and fled,” the servant said. “Her parents and some others are searching for her now, but I’m afraid…”

Grandfather rose from his chair, a mixture of horror and fury on his face. “My God,” he whispered. “Stop her. She’s heading for the lighthouse!”

That’s essentially the first in a four-act short story. My original intent was to build this thing out into part of a transmedia story. From my project notes on January 21, 2013:

THE LIGHTHOUSE IN THE WOOD is a paired transmedia project. One part is a short story aimed to be published someplace like UNSTUCK. The second is an [interactive fiction piece / game / installation art piece] that combines a work in Inform7 and tangible storytelling elements connected wirelessly to the interactive fiction piece.

The short story sets up the backstory, and ends with the unsettling action of the boy entering the lighthouse.

The game starts with the unnamed narrator entering the lighthouse and discovering its secrets.

The physical lighthouse has lights on multiple levels that flick on as the player ascends, and perhaps a device inside it that could vibrate as the player gets to the end of the story/game.

Another physical artifact might be a framed picture of the family tree that changes based on where the user is in the story. When the user begins, it shows the complete family tree. When they hit the page where Clarise enters the lighthouse, the family tree changes to reflect the deaths of the fallen family members.

Technologically, this project consists of a digital book, like an iPad, that serves up the storybook. Turning pages triggers effects, such as the thunderclap in the surround sound speakers. (Install into an antique chair?) A side table holds the model lighthouse, the “book”, and the small framed screen that shows the family tree. A freestanding lamp beside the chair is also wirelessly connected to the experience.

I might still do something like that, but then a unique opportunity arose at the Innovation Lab. Soon after I joined the lab, we launched an ambitious, multi-year research initiative called The Edison Project, which asserts that the media and entertainment industry is in its most intense state of flux since Edison invented the kinetoscope. We’re in the middle of transitioning from an information economy, in which the emphasis is on exponentially-improving technology and the information gleaning, creating, or sharing that is enabled by that technology, to an imagination economy, wherein technology becomes ubiquitous, commonplace and affordable, and the emphasis shifts to what can be done with that technology and who is doing it. We break this research initiative down into five major areas of change: the New Creators + Makers, the New Funding + Business Models, the New Metrics + Measurement, the New Public Spaces, and the New Screens. Me being me, I gravitated towards the New Screens, and I started asking: how do you tell stories with such “new screens” as 3D printers like the Makerbot Duplicator, augmented reality (AR) devices like Google Glass, or virtual reality (VR) devices like the Oculus Rift?

In the fall of 2013, we held our first Think & Do event associated with the Edison Project. A Think & Do is a fast-paced, high-energy think tank-style event that mixes a group of participants together in a highly participatory environment to tackle a particular problem and come up with compelling possible solutions. They’re the brainchild of AIL creative director and research fellow Erin Reilly and AIL research council member Professor Susan Resnick-West, and you can find out more about them at the AIL website. In any case, we held our autumn 2013 Think & Do on the topic of “Re-Envisioning the Home Entertainment Experience“. As we described it:

The goal of this Think & Do workshop at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab was to come up with some solutions as to what defines the amplified experience of home entertainment. To facilitate that, we organized a day full of discussions, play, and high-speed creativity. Much of the day was loosely structured and largely shaped by the group of experts we invited to participate. In attendance were key executives from the TV business and strategy side, creators and producers experimenting with content, user experience designers and developers, and “wild cards” with an early appetite for repackaging and enhancing the television viewing experience. And as with all Think & Do workshops, USC professors, staff and students also contributed to our collaborative experience.

Or, in video:

The goal of a Think & Do is for everyone involved to walk away with a bunch of new ideas. This includes the lab, in the form of ideas for projects and/or prototypes that we can work on moving forward. Out of this one came multiple prototypes, which I’ll write about here in due time, but the biggest one for me came out of this:

360-Degree Stories

Participants in this group were thrilled by the possibilities of 360-degree viewing experiences with technologies like the Oculus Rift could provide for horror productions, namely FX’s original series American Horror Story. The element of surprise and suspense could be experienced first-hand with such tools.

I’m not a big fan of American Horror Story, but the idea of 360-degree storytelling was crazy compelling. I’d been thinking a great deal about how you might tell a story with the Connected Home and/or the Internet of Things, and the pieces started to click together. When creating a Connected Home, one of the pieces of lowest-hanging fruit is replacing your regular picture frames with Internet-connected digital ones, so you can update the photos on the walls in a blink. That same connectivity and dynamism make such digital picture frames an ideal target for a Connected Home storytelling experiment – so The Lighthouse in the Woods could be told not through “a framed picture of the family tree that changes based on where the user is in the story”, as described above, but through the digital picture frames hung around the user’s living room. However, I wasn’t sure the idea would work, so I wanted to create a prototype for that prototype – a proto-prototype, if you will. So that’s what I did. We ordered an Oculus Rift dev kit, I blew the dust off my 3D modeling skills from college and started boning up on Unity, and I started to work.

At its heart, The Lighthouse in the Woods is a very contrarian little beastie. The Oculus Rift has always been billed as a gaming device – the title text for oculusvr.com reads “Oculus Rift – Virtual Reality Headset for 3D Gaming”, for crying out loud – but what I wanted to build was deliberately, proudly non-interactive. As I set about building it, the first influence I kept in mind were things like Conor McPherson’s The Weir, which I had the pleasure of seeing with its original cast in London back around 1998-1999. It’s not a complex play, nor does it have much going for it by way of spectacle. It has one set, a pub in rural Ireland, and a cast of only five people. These five people essentially sit around the pub for the whole play and tell each other ghost stories. This is how Wikipedia currently summarizes the plot:

The play opens in a rural Irish pub with Brendan, the publican and Jack, a car mechanic and garage owner. These two begin to discuss their respective days and are soon joined by Jim. The three then discuss Valerie, a pretty young woman from Dublin who has just rented an old house in the area.

Finbar, a businessman, arrives with Valerie, and the play revolves around reminiscence and the kind of banter which only comes about amongst men who have a shared upbringing. After a few drinks, the group begin telling stories with a supernatural slant, related to their own experience or those of others in the area, and which arise out of the popular preoccupations of Irish folklore: ghosts, fairies and mysterious happenings.

After each man (with the exception of Brendan) has told a story, Valerie tells her own: the reason why she has left Dublin. Valerie’s story is melancholy and undoubtedly true, with a ghostly twist which echoes the earlier tales, and shocks the men who become softer, kinder, and more real. There is the hint that the story may lead to salvation and, eventually, a happy ending for two of the characters.

Finbar and Jim leave, and in the last part of the play, Jack’s final monologue is a story of personal loss which, he comments, is at least not a ghostly tale but in some ways is nonetheless about a haunting.

The play is as much about lack of close relationships and missed connections as it is about anything else. The weir of the title is a hydroelectric dam on a nearby waterway that is mentioned only in passing as Finbar describes the local attractions to Valerie. It anticipates and symbolises the flow of the stories into and around each other.

I’ve always loved live storytelling, and especially live ghost story-telling (and no, that’s not an oxymoron). I still remember listening to ghost stories with my boy scout troop in Kenlo Park outside of Shreve, Ohio, I remember sitting on the school bus listening to my friend Amy Raubenolt tell spooky stories (that, if I recall correctly, she swore her grandfather told her), and I remember listening to professor Tim Shutt giving the most amazing ghost story tours of Kenyon around Halloween. The Weir blew my mind because of how it transported the audience to a perfect ghost story-telling experience: in a spooky, rural Irish pub, as atmospheric as anything. So simple, and yet so perfect. The room is itself a character, just as much – perhaps even more so – than the actors themselves.

And, I thought to myself, that’s how one might become a “virtual reality novelist,” or, more to the point, how someone whose primary creative tool is words might merge them with a space to tell a story in something like the Oculus Rift.

And so I built this.