This week in the Real & Virtual worlds unit we were once again asked to listen to a couple of episodes from the Voices of VR Podcast, as well as read from two other sources.
Podcasts
The first readings for this week were again from the Voices of VR podcast — I’ve quite enjoyed these, as they require minimal focus to listen to, but are usually fairly interesting in terms of content. The first of the two we were provided from this podcast were a podcast with Richard Skarbez on immersion & coherence (#130) and one with the Oculus head of experiences regarding Immersive storytelling.
The first of these two spoke a lot about coherence, and how a coherent space is extremely important to creating an immersive experience — If something is deemed plausible by the viewer/player, it’s far easier to get them immersed in the experience. He spoke about dimensions of freedom regarding this, and how this is moreso regarding the way that you would expect things to work. He refers to this idea throughout as “place illusion” or “plausibility illusion”.
This is something that I wholly agree with — An experience feeling natural or rational makes it far easier to engage with it, and I feel that some of the best virtual reality experiences I have had are those where objects and tools behave in a manner you would expect them to. He expands upon this saying that he imagines that a simple scene with accurate physics and objects that would act in this kind of expected manner is far more important than having a scene with all the “bells and whistles”, in his words. I would somewhat agree with this stance, but I feel there’s probably a better middle ground to be had than this — If you leave your virtual experience too lacking in content, people will be less likely to continue playing it, even if it acts in a satisfying manner.
The second of these VR podcasts talked more about “hybrid” experiences, especially in virtual reality, that aren’t as simple as just being a game, or just an experience, but more something in between, and he says that he feels it’s something he’d like to see more of — SteamVR and the oculus store are great, but they lean heavily into the already existing market of gamers, so these kinds of experiences wouldn’t sell that well there, at least right now. I can easily see how this is an issue, especially when it comes to indie creators trying to create these kinds of experiences, and having a proper ecosystem for these kinds of developers is massively important to any potential mainstream success they might have.
From what I gathered, he felt that there’s a design paradigm that needs to be discovered that would lead people specifically towards wanting to use things like VR headsets over other platforms, and right now he doesn’t feel that that’s quite there yet. It’s nice to see these kind of thoughts from someone working with oculus — It doesn’t feel at all biased, and he seems very personally invested in the future of this kind of platform, which might not be in the long term interest of a company like oculus, whose main income right now likely comes from the gaming audience.
Readings
The first non-audio reading this week was a extract from “Immersion, Engagement, and Prescence: A Method for Analysing, 3-D Video games”. This chapter functions primarily as a reexamination of our concept of immersion in video games, and their opinion that immersion has become an “excessively vague, all-inclusive concept”. They then go on to seperate this idea into sub-definitions of Immersion, Engagement and Presence.
She goes on to talk about how immersion itself can be seperated into a couple of different ideas, in how that if we are talking about video games on a diegetic vs non-diegetic level, immersion can mean multiple different things depending on which of these experiences we are talking about, and she comments on how as of yet there aren’t seperate definitions for these, and I agree that this should probably be the case, especially given that immersion itself can often be used interchangeably with presence.
I found her section regarding engagement quite amusing to read, because while it cites things from the early 1930s, they are ideas (at least to me) that still apply to modern gaming, and the idea of entering into an activity in search of pleasure only to have the relationship between participants collectively brought “net pain rather than net pleasures” applies very commonly to the mindset I see of people who play competitive online games such as MOBAs or First person shooters.
Our second source from this week was “The Virtuous Cycle of Immersion”, a short article written by Janina Saarnio. This article covered a few different aspects of immersion, including talking about how different levels of immersion can offer a sense of embodiment; fully immersive virtual reality experiences offer “a sense of embodiment, which can be defined as a state where the users feel themselves as a part of the VR environment”, and conversely that VR components such as the controllers are part of or extensions to their own being.
This latter concept isn’t a new concept, and is one you see and can experience often with tools and vehicles in real life, but interacting with them in this kind of space would make it feel a much more natural experience.
This article similarly to our first source for this week also briefly covers presence, in that it defines immersion as more of an experience over time, and describing presence as a more instant, but temporary connection. Lastly it also covers the concept of flow which we had discussed previously in class this week, and it took this concept further in that the idea of interruption of the “flow state” could be a possible way to apply to psychological issues such as phobias, in order to help people conquer their fears, but as they then cite following this statement this is something that appears to be contentious among psychologists. The human mind is extremely complex, and I could easily see it being the case that these kind of methods might only be effective for some people, and not others. I would say that this is supported by some phobias being treated with gradual mental training, while others are treated with exposure therapy.
Project Work
This week we were also tasked with creating an interaction plan and an immersion plan for our projects. I will add images of these to this blog post below, but outside of this I spent a bit more time looking into the plugins I mentioned last week for unity — I think I’ve settled on using OpenXR due to cross-compatibility with other headsets.
This week I spent a bit of time experimenting with and learning how this specific plugin functions, as in my past I’d used the SteamVR plugin for unity which has since been deprecated as of Unity 2020 (As now there’s a lot of drag and drop systems in order to allow for a more customisable pipeline for this). I did have some minor issues with looking into some OpenXR specific tutorials, as some of them only functioned on earlier versions of unity 2020, which is a shame.
