In an age of information, attention our scarcest resource. If storytelling is the art of navigating (your user’s) attention, then the rise of VR—a fundamentally new storytelling medium—is a powerful opportunity for resource management. VR is poised to revolutionize business, entertainment, education, healthcare, and more. Still, the devices that power these experiences have yet to coalesce around an optimal user experience, and VR content creation remains nascent. How do we capitalize on the potential of VR? Where do we look to understand this new media paradigm? In this talk, I’ll share insights based on my expertise as an executive leading the charge of new interaction paradigms; data from 200,00 developers worldwide who actively build embodied VR experiences; and a decade of experience as a professional dancer, choreographer, and performer. Audiences will emerge from this talk* with new understanding of the core components of embodied storytelling, such as: - How body language impacts decision-making - How to define the user's mask: are they an explorer, a guest, or a voyeur? - How to break free of the traditional narrative arc driven by the hero’s journey to create narratives based on an interconnected storyworld - How to uncover content domains and use cases uniquely suited to VR: the dangerous, the impossible, the expensive, and the counterproductive - How to explore the grey spaces between real-world and digital physics in order to build a more human experience I hope our audience will leave this talk* with an understanding that VR is more than glorified film and bigger than gaming. This technology upends narrative control, unleashes mosaic perspectives, and demands embodiment. Thanks to VR, tiny screens that clamor for our attention give way to objects and experiences that respond to our humanity. VR must be a virtual world, not a virtual window, and we can only accomplish the former through rich, embodied interaction. In VR, we discover that interaction can be a form of art. And when we do that, we can transform not only how humans interact with technology, but also how humans fundamentally understand the world.