Baba Yaga: Immersive Story Experience (Dome Projection)

Baba Yaga is a prototype for ‘full dome storytelling’, exploring the tensions and synergies between traditional oral storytelling, established forms of responsive story structure from video games, and emerging practices from real time and virtual production. It uses real-time production in Unreal Engine to create a responsive, interactive, immersive and participatory oral storytelling experience for young audiences.

Staff and Students from the Ulster Screen Academy collaborate with Tale Time to explore new approaches to oral storytelling, experimenting with the tensions caused with linear media (like video), and the adaptive nature of oral storytelling that responds to its audience.

Using techniques from Virtual Production and Real-Time Rendering, the team has prototyped a new collective story experience where audiences can share an immersive story in real time. The installation uses a portable, inflatable projection dome in ultra-HD to create an enclosed narrative space for up to 30 people to collectively experience an immersive retelling of Baba Yaga’s folklore to young audiences. The project creates a real-time rendered projection environment using Unreal Engine, which is projected inside the dome and creates a story canvas which responds to the pace of Vicky’s story as she adapts the delivery to draw audiences deeper into the story. The installation uses Unreal Engine to create a series of silhouette projection environments that surround and envelop the audience. These environments respond to the storytellers’ inputs and triggers to adapt to each audience’s engagement. The adaptive, real-time nature of the project means that each telling of the story is different, allowing the oral storyteller to draw in the audience, respond to their excitement, and create a unique rendition for each performance.

Refining workflows throughout the development of Baba Yaga: Immersive Story Dome Experience identified that new tools are needed to support artists and storytellers to access affordable shared immersion. Collaborating with the production company Off World Live (OWL) researchers were able to introduce a new export setting to their existing Unreal Engine live-streaming video plugin. This now better supports equipment used by the community, especially those with smaller budgets and artists making experimental work using a mirror dome.