Umwelt in an umwelt: Co-developing within immersive virtual environments and the paradoxical nature of reality and hyperreality (original) (raw)
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AVANT: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, 2020
In this text it is argued that immersion in virtual reality (VR) with the aid of contemporary VR equipment may offer access to novel types of virtual worlds that differ qualitatively from the “real” world and from other types of fictional worlds. The text begins by (a) distinguishing between VR systems, virtual environments, and virtual worlds; (b) showing how the virtual worlds facilitated by VR systems resemble and differ from the “virtual worlds” created in one’s mind when, for example, reading a novel or watching a film; and (c) identifying necessary and optional elements of a VR-facilitated virtual world. Employing a phenomenological approach that draws on the thought of Ingarden and Norberg-Schulz, it is shown that a visitor to a VR-facilitated virtual world can (and frequently does) shift his or her conscious attention along three different “axes”. First, one’s attention can move “horizontally” between the media that disclose the virtual world through different senses. Second, one’s attention can shift “vertically” between the virtual world’s different ontological strata, including its layers of myriad atomic stimuli; distinguishable elements that possess spatiotemporal extension; assemblages of elements that have a context and relations but lack individual meaning; glimpses that build up a lattice of meaning and contribute to one’s knowledge of the world; and the virtual world envisioned as a coherent mentally concretized whole. Third, one’s attention can shift “interspatially” between the many different overlapping constituent spaces of the virtual world, including its perceptual, concrete, natural, built, identifiable, technological, emotional, social, economic, political, cultural, ecological, and possibility spaces. This triaxial phenomenological framework can shed new light on the rich and diverse ways in which VR-facilitated virtual worlds manifest themselves as emergent wholes constituted within human consciousness; also, it suggests approaches by which visitors might more proactively mentally explore and come to inhabit such virtual worlds.
Interfacing the Real and the Virtual: User Embodiment in Immersive Dynamic Virtual Spaces
2005
This paper discusses the performative boundary between the real and the virtual as it constitutes itself based on the potentials, conditions and abilities of Virtual Reality (VR), considered as both a technology and a medium. Starting from the prospects and the areas of application of ‘new’ technologies within the context of architecture, the paper seeks the point of intersection between an architectural perspective, a posthuman view and a technological potential. The focus thereby lies in the greatest challenge of VR, that is, the integration of the users as they interface the virtual and the real. The conditions and implications of such dynamic processes, perceived as space generating, rather than representing, are explored based on the authors’ virtual environment: Uzume.
PREVIEW: Immersivity. Philosophical Perspectives on Technologically Mediated Experience (2/2022)
Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age, 2022
The notion of ‘immersivity’ is a pivotal element in the description of technologically mediated experience, designating an inherent quality of objects, spaces and more generally situations able to produce an impression of immersion. Different from the notion of ‘immersion’ itself – which describes «a process of reception» focusing on sensations and feelings of the subject of experience – «immersivity designates a process of production» (Freitag et alii, 2020). The issue pays a special attention to the conditions of possibility, both material and immaterial, of immersive experiences: technologies, environments, materials, practices, but also theoretical, ideological and political frames. At the same time, it aims at exploring some theoretical questions that are still open in the debate on immersive experience, in the digital environments as well as in other contexts. In order to do so, different and complementary philosophical approaches to the question of immersivity are combined, coming from multiple philosophical disciplines, such as: aesthetics, material and critical historicism coupled with a genealogical approach, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and post-phenomenology, cognitive science (4E cognition), and deconstructionism.
The New Reality through Virtuality
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)
tive structures of perception and the cultural models involved in the process of understanding the reality. In the second section, as architects, we use to have "a global set of social and technical responsabilities" to organize the physical space, but now we must also be able to organize the "virtual space" obtained from a multidimensional set of computer simulations. There are certain features that can be used as "sensory parameters" when we are dealing with architectural design in the "virtual world", taking into consideration the differences between "inmersive virtual reality" and "non inmersive virtual reality" [2].Velez Jahn 99. In the appendix we present a summary of some conclusions based on a set of pedagogical applications analysing the positive and the negative consequences of working exclusively in a "virtual world".
CONCEPTUALITY IN VIRTUAL REALITY.pdf
2016
Abstract Twentieth-century art favors an aesthetic no longer oriented to beauty (which is associated with harmony and unity), but to “sublime”. Immersion by itself is a triumph of the experience the sublime offers over a detached viewpoint of the object-artwork; it mobilizes the entire human body seeking to offer a full experience, which is essential for the artwork to move us; it can fill us, though, with awe and make us weak-willed beings that accept without criticism the value system and the ideological choices inherent in the artwork. Virtual worlds are increasingly seductive, and people immersing in them end up perceiving reality through the lenses of virtual reality; and wanting to create a reality resembling virtual reality. The current paper attempts to investigate how it is possible to achieve a kind of immersion that allows for a full experience not marginalizing thought. It will provide an in-depth analysis of the nature of immersion, and of the means used to achieve it. This will help highlight which kind and which “quantity” of immersion has to be sought for, in order not to provoke adverse and unwanted results, such as the creation of the feeling of uncanny, or create empty signifiers, that make us loose interest in the artwork.
Immersion in Virtual Worlds - The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality
The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, 2013
Virtual worlds are enabling experiences that were not previously available through other media. One such experience is the potential to have a sense of inhabiting the simu- lated spaces they offer, not just through the use of the player’s imaginative faculty, but also through the cybernetic circuit between player and machine. This phenomenon has been described by the terms “presence” and “immersion.” Although the two terms are used in various fields and have been discussed for three decades, there seems to be a lack of consensus as to what either of them actually refers to (Ermi and Mayra 2005; King and Krzywinska 2006; Tamborini and Skalski 2006; Brown and Cairns 2004; Jennett et al. 2008). The term “immersion” is particularly problematic because it is used so widely when discussing experiential facets of anything from digital games to painting (Grau 2003), literature (Nell 1988), and cinema (Bazin 1967). Nevertheless the phenomenon these two terms have been enlisted to describe is crucial to our understanding of the relationship between user and virtual world, as it represents one end of a continuum of intensity of involvement with virtual worlds and addresses the very notion of being in the context of such simulated environments. In this chapter I claim that the confusion and apprehension surrounding the use of these two terms is based on a number of challenges they pose to a clear understand- ing of the phenomenon they have been employed to describe. The chapter takes digital games as the most popular and experientially powerful forms of virtual worlds and thus uses them as its primary exemplar. The radical stance taken here will be to claim that this confusion arises because neither metaphor adequately describes the relationship between player and game. Both assume a unidirectional dive of human subjectivity into a containing vessel, a split between the physical “here” and the virtual “there” that is overcome temporarily when the phenomenon is experienced.
An Aesthetics of Digital Virtual Environments
This chapter examines digital virtual environments as a site for art and proposes a formal aesthetics for art in digital virtual environments. The study arises from the author's decades-long practice producing art in virtual environments and the related theoretical considerations that have arisen from that practice. The technical, conceptual and ontological status of virtual environments is examined in order to establish a base of intrinsic qualities that identify virtual environments as a medium for art. The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon is used to achieve this. The elements and principles the artist must employ to work with this medium are identified as data, display and modulation. The specificities of virtual environments as a medium for art are examined in order to establish a formal aesthetics. In particular, digital colour, visual opacity, digital sound, code, artificial intelligence, emergence and agency are identified as the primary qualities that the artist manipulates to bring forth art in a virtual environment. Draft for chapter published in "New Opportunities for for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds", 2015.
Experience in Virtual Environments: Scenarios of Spacetime Transcendence
In the framework of postmodern experience, the exponential growth and integration of new technologies in everyday life and communication has innovated the configuration of digital culture. Fields like art, cultural representation, cinema and games have been greatly affected by the use of mass digital media, as the dimensions of reality are expanded through the potentials of virtual world. Virtual reality involves digital products, 3d representations and multimedia applications that manage to expand the possibilities of each user and receive stimulus beyond the limitations of physical spacetime. The term virtual is standing not only for the form of the digital medium but also for all the possibilities enabled through the design and the scenario of virtual environments. The stimulus and experiences become available and shared at global level and the amount of possible activities done in specific space unities. Particularly, through the management of scenario and narration multimedia ontology is developed. By the term scenario, we don’t simply mean a time sequence or the narration of a story. It involves the composition of a complete concept with defined ontologies that specify the plot of multimedia applications. The postmodern plot of digital media may overcome the limitations of a linear presentation, providing navigation options that do not need to be predefined, simulating the complexity of real life. Furthermore, two projects are mentioned: The first one concerns a historical castle of Mytilene, represented at 3 different historical periods, and the second pertains to a discrete modern building in Athens, emphasizing at the alternative navigations provided to the user by the scenario of the digital work.
Immersive Technologies in Media: Towards the Concept of Generative Mediatization?
RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism, 2021
The practices of so-called immersive media have been developing in the past few years. The immersive media situation characteristics, infrastructure, content and social aspects have been identified through the use of a multilevel structural and functional methodology, and make it possible to fix its specificity at all levels. The new format of the immersive media situation leads to changes in approaches to the mediatization studies. In the article, to study the media immersive communicative situation a generative approach is proposed for the first time. It is relevant to topological thinking, and to the modern immanent picture of the world, when a person and technology co-create a new form. Along with the generative approach and generative design, the necessity of applying relevant paradigms and methods of psychology to form new theoretical and methodological foundations of immersive user-centric media communication is substantiated. Several new concepts and terms are introduced, in...