In the largest cinema at the Venice film festival, guests gather for the premiere of Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro's lavish account of a man who dared to play God and created a monster. When the young scientist reanimates a dead body for his colleagues, some see it as a trick while others are outraged. "It's an abomination, an obscenity," shouts one hide-bound old timer, and his alarm is partly justified. Every technological breakthrough opens Pandora's box. You don't know what's going to crawl out or where it will then choose to go.

What will storytelling look like in 20 years? Will it still be on your television? Will it printed on paper or projected in 3D? Prophesying the future is hard. But, like fortune telling with tea leaves, sometimes the future can be glimpsed in what's here right now. Last year, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch – a nihilistic choose-your-own-adventure style film with five main endings – introduced Netflix viewers to a term that has only recently entered the TV lexicon: interactive storytelling.

Lucy may be a VR character, but she doesn't act like one. Like any friend, she remembers what you've done and uses that information to inform how she talks with you. She can express a full range of emotions. And she's as good at hanging out as she is going on adventures. Initially, Lucy was designed largely to follow a script and respond to viewer actions.

Eyefluence, a company that's rooted in optics, AI, machine learning and mechanical engineering, has built an interface that lets a user communicate with a virtual environment through sight alone. The idea is to convert looking into action. So the software enables you to use your eyes to do anything that you would do with a finger on a smartphone. With a display in front of you, you would be able to navigate a menu, launch applications, pan, zoom and scroll, and even slip in information simply by looking. Beyond the boost in productivity, though, one of the most compelling applications of this eye-machine interaction is in immersive storytelling.