Establishment and Implementation of Guidelines for Narrative Audio-based Room-scale Virtual Reality using Practice-based Methods

Room-scale Virtual Reality (VR) presents sound designers with new challenges to tell stories with audio in games with player-driven narratives. These challenges arise from the player moving in and interacting with the virtual environment. The paper performs a small scoping review of VR/non-VR games and associated literature to identify issues and solutions to the placement of speech-based audio using practice-based research methods. The review leads to the proposition of design guidelines and strategies for their implementation. The paper advocates that each instance of speech-based audio should be short, interactive, and complemented by non-speech audio. Furthermore, each instance’s spatial, interactive, visual, aural, and narrative representation should be considered in combination. The paper also suggests that 3D-binaural audio informed by physics can aid storytelling and make virtual environments player-responsive.