It is really quite odd to consider what elements of real life people choose to translate into their virtual existence on the Internet.

 

We have translated the “Christmas card” – a symbol of former friendship and regard – into the badge of appearing on someone’s “friends” list, receiving cursory updates and greetings from acquaintances/former friends who are no longer part of our current lives via tools like Facebook.

 

We have taken advertising with us into the virtual world, but done away with ad breaks, which force us away from the box to make a cup of tea.

 

We have translated our forums for chat – our coffee bars and our high school reunions – but we have not translated our quiet spaces to ponder.  The Internet is a doing place, afterall…

 

The reason I have come to consider this odd division of things we have translated and things we have not is because I am currently trying to improve on a standard online system by translating real world values into a virtual format.

 

I am trying to create an online tour.  If you look at most online tours, they can look pretty neat… you can usually swivel round a 360^o picture until you feel sick and click on a few hotspots to get some information in the form of text.  No problem there!  A virtual equivalent of a real world activity – taking a look around a place and getting some contextual information about it…

 

But is that what a real, live-guided tour does?

 

Very often, we get so wrapped up in the idea that our lives have a virtual parallel dimension that we forget to compare the virtual with the reality to see whether we are really achieving this dream.

 

In the case of virtual tours, they generally miss out so much of what a real tour guide is doing that aside from giving a visual experience of a place, they can hardly be said to be “guides” at all. 

 

I analysed the role of a tour guide and compared this with a survey of the variety of virtual tour variations available.  I was surprised by the number of recommendations I could make for improving existing standards and concepts of “virtual tours” based on this comparison.  It was almost as if the designers and standard setters, whoever they may be, had devised a way of doing a really cool thing, called it a tour, but never really thought about what a real tour does at all. 

This sounds like a harsh analysis, but when I started to look deeper, I found that this was often the case.  Virtual equivalents to reality are being developed all the time without much reference to the actual reality that they are trying to represent. 

 

Sometimes this is a good thing.  We can improve upon the reality we have in our virtual world in a kind of utopian fashion.

 

But in other ways we risk missing out skills in our new world which would enable and facilitate users greatly.  The skill that the virtual tours miss out is narrative – none of them provide you with an overall narrative for the place they are exploring in the way a real tour guide would, and so we have a virtual world where spaces – physical or otherwise – are described with nuggets of information and connected by hyperlinks, rather than being connected by a narrative that could enhance understanding and contextualise the information.  It is almost as if the virtual world is a stripped down version of reality in this sense: dispensing with the subtleties of connections whilst claiming to make links and connections between things clearer. 

 

If this is the world we are supposed to be bringing storytelling into, we need to be thinking not just about places we can locate stories, but rather the whole attitude and design of this virtual reality and how it could be altered to enable storytelling in all its forms – just like the real world does.  Basically, we need to think more about how and what we are translating into our virtual realm from our real world, and how it all hangs together, rather than just trying to blindly create a utopian equivalent in flat pack form.