VR and the death of the screen plane

Film is about engagement with the audience. Drawing the audience into a story so as to forget everything else for the time they are watching that movie requires a suspension of disbelief by the audience. Those who develop technology for creative purposes have had at their heart a remit to give filmmakers the ability to give audiences less and less reason to break this suspension of disbelief by creating more and more visually believable worlds and characters. The adoption of stereoscopy to the film making process has mixed reasons behind it. Due to the audience´s fascination with this art form, the corporate producers saw a means to make larger amounts of money from the same production. Those at the more grass roots level see stereoscopy as a means of engaging the audience to much greater levels. In an art where perception is everything, audiences are being led to perceive that they are further into the world of the story and that the world of the story is coming out of the screen to meet them. But there is a limit to this. 360-degree, stereo 3D Virtual Reality is now taking this to a much greater level. No longer are images in front of or behind a convergence plane as there is no longer a perceived screen plane. This paper´s aim is to explore what this means, from an artistic perspective, to this fast moving industry.