• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.45-52
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• 2018

The virtual reality (VR) cartoon is a format of VR contents that leverage the characteristics of webtoons that provides the simple story line and graphical storytelling tools to strategically surmount limitations of VR contents design. The VR cartoon enables people to experience the imaginary three-dimensional space in the webtoon as a real space by the transformation of webtoon contents through VR prototyping. The VR cartoon successfully presents focused environment where people can readily pay attention to the contents without notable motion sickness. People have been familiar with the storytelling strategy in the context of published cartoons and webtoons, likely we've understood the narrative of a movie through the continuous scenes projected in the screen. Indeed, it has been recognized as a popular toolset of communication, where visual images are sequentially delivered by replacing multiple planar spaces to tell a story narrative. While there are discrete panels with the time and space resolution in the graphical cartoons, people can distill a commit closure based on their past experiences. This is a typical "grammar" of the cartoon, which can be extrapolated to the VR cartoon that provides a seminal storytelling strategy. In this article, we review how the storytelling strategy in webtoons has been transformed into that in VR cartoons, and analyze the key components of VR cartoons. We envision that our research can potentially create keystones to produce variety of new VR contents by reflecting various narrative media including cartoon as a 'sequential art'.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.49
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• pp.677-696
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• 2017

Cartoons and consequently animation are an effective way of visualizing futuristic scenarios. Here we look at how animation is becoming ubiquitous and an integral part of this future today: the cybernetic and mediated society that we are being transformed into. Animation therefore becomes a form of speech between humans and this networked reality, either as an interface or as representation that gives temporal form to objects. Animation or specifically animated films usually are associated with character based short and feature films, fiction or nonfiction. However animation is not constricted to traditional cinematic formats and language, the same way that design and communication have become treated as separate fields, however according to $Vil{\acute{e}}m$ Flusser they aren't. The same premise can be applied to animation in a networked culture: Animation has become an intrinsic to design processes and products - as in motion graphics, interface design and three-dimensional visualization. Video-games, virtual reality, map based apps and social networks constitute layers of an expanded universe that embodies our network based culture. They are products of design and media disciplines that are increasingly relying on animation as a universal language suited to multi-cultural interactions carried in digital ambients. In this sense animation becomes a discourse, the same way as Roland Barthes describes myth as a type of speech. With the objective of exploring the role of animation as a design tool, the proposed research intends to develop transmedia creative visual strategies using animation both as narrative and as an user interface.