One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve presence, but presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into presence and Mel says that it’s a combination of the Place Illusion and Presence Illusion, which Richard Skarbez elaborates by saying that the Place Illusion represents the degree of immersion that you feel by being transported to another place, and the Plausibility Illusion is the degree to which you feel that that the overall scene matches your expectations for coherence.
Anthony Steed is a professor in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group in the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Anthony studied under Mel Slater, and he was a co-author of one of the major presence surveys referred to as the Slater, Usoh & Steed survey in the “Depth of Presence in Virtual Environments” paper. Anthony was also the winner of the 2016 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award presented at the IEEE VR conference this year.
I had a chance to catch up with Anthony at the IEEE VR conference where he talks about doing distributed presence research with a Gear VR, the role of plausibility in presence, how social presence fits into Mel’s two illusions of presence, and some of the discussions about sharing knowledge between game developers and academics that happened at GDC and IEEE VR conferences this year.
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Here’s a video of the Presence Experiment that Anthony conducted on the Gear VR, and where he found that tapping on your body during the music without having your hands tracked had a negative impact on embodiment.
Here’s the 2015 IEEE VR poster from Richard Skarbez talking about his presence research into the Place Illusion and Plausibility Illusion:
Interesting #IEEEVR poster on presence
Immersion influences Place Illusion Coherence influences Plausibility Illusion pic.twitter.com/FXHQIem4b3— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) March 23, 2015
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. On today's episode, I have Anthony Steed, who is a professor at the University of College London, and he also just won the 2016 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award that was presented at the IEEE VR Conference this year. And so Anthony studied under Mel Slater, who is one of the leading researchers into presence. And so Anthony has continued to do various different research into presence, especially with some of the new gear VR and consumer VR technologies that are out there. And so we'll be talking to Anthony about some of his distributed research in presence that he's doing, as well as some of the theories around social presence and self-presence within VR. as well as some of the discussions happening at GDC this year, where there was some academics talking about what game developers can learn from the academic world, as well as what academics can learn from what's happening in gaming. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by the Intel Core i7 processor. VR really forced me to buy my first high-end gaming PC And so Intel asked me to come talk about my process. So my philosophy was to get the absolute best parts on everything, because I really don't want to have to worry about replacing components once the second gen headsets come out and the VR min specs will inevitably go up at some point. So I did rigorous research online, looked at all the benchmarks, online reviews. And what I found was that the best CPU was the Intel Core i7 processor. But don't take my word for it. Go do your own research. And I think what you'll find is that the i7 really is the best option that's out there. So this interview with Anthony happened at the IEEE VR conference happening in Greenville, South Carolina from March 19th to 23rd. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:03.450] Anthony Steed: Hello, I'm Anthony Steed from University College London, and we're doing a variety of things in VR at the moment to do with sort of low-level systems work, also use of telepresence, some work on avatars, and even some work on games.
[00:02:19.448] Kent Bye: And so there was a I think the game that you produced for part of the mobile game jam about presence and trying to do an experiment around presence and What were you able to find with that project?
[00:02:29.820] Anthony Steed: For the mobile game jam, we built an experiment that people can run in their own homes. So most of our work is done with lab-based experiments. We get 20 to 60 people that come to the lab. We've got excellent control of the conditions. We know who they are. We can profile people based on age and gender and so on. And we had the idea that given all this interest and all the upcoming consumer equipment, could we try and run an experiment that was just done in the wild? So we just put it up online and let people submit data. So we did all of that in a rush for this game jam. The app's just called Presence Experiment and you can download it and submit some data. We will write about you anonymously. The app is a very simple app which we showed a singer singing in a bar and then we're interested in how you react to three separate things. One is whether or not you have a body or not, because most games and most demos at the moment don't have a body, but a lot of previous work and research work in virtual reality has shown that a body is very important. Also, whether or not the singer actually tries to engage you in eye gaze. And then the third one is a little subtle, but we asked people to try and tap along to the music, and that was an attempt to try and get them to induce an ownership of the body. And the results, which were very encouraging, encouraging us to follow this route, indicated that the body was important, that the singer looking at you had no effect whatsoever that we could detect, and the tapping along to the music was completely terrible. And we simply don't recommend anybody tries to do it. At least unless they've got a better idea than us. Asking somebody to tap along just emphasised the fact that we couldn't track their hands because it was for Gear VR and later on we released it for cardboard. So we're seeing something different than they felt. We're hoping to do some more over this summer with more task-specific things. Now more advanced consumer systems are coming up.
[00:04:24.447] Kent Bye: It's interesting the idea to try to do distributed research with consumer VR. As people have these head-mounted displays in their home, you're able to potentially get wider swaths of research data, it sounds like. So is this a trajectory that you plan on continuing to have people kind of in their own uncontrolled environments, but more controlled within VR? So perhaps that's sort of the baseline where you're able to actually simulate a controlled environment virtually and then do experimental data in that way.
[00:04:53.325] Anthony Steed: Yeah, that was our motivation is to try and start to do distributed experiments. There's an opportunity with all this excitement that everybody, including the vendors and the software developers, can learn from who their participants are, like who is actually using these systems, what their biases are, are they interested in using this interaction technique or that one. There's a lot of, at GDC last week, lots of people stood up and said what worked in their game. and that's all great and lots of people learning but there's some really really good insights into new ways of doing things but you have to ask if it's going to transfer from one game to another one or one application to another one and unfortunately all of these applications at the moment can't learn from each other so if I know that this person's felt a little unstable in this application because I can detect it from, say, head wobble. That might be useful for everybody to know, not just me as an application developer. So hopefully, we can start a discussion about how we might be able to gather information, possibly by some people just volunteering to be sort of giving feedback to everybody that this worked, this didn't work, and do that in a way which is anonymous and secure so that we can develop better apps. There's a second reason for doing it which is if you come to a conference like this one of the things that you would worry about is a lot of experiments are done with university students and a lot of games are developed by game developers who are very not the world's broadest population and so I think that some of the things that people are suggesting might not work on the broadest possible population because they're not testing with some segments, or at least not testing extensively with some segments of the population. I think gathering this data this way might help with that to get more results in that everybody can use.
[00:06:40.027] Kent Bye: And when you're evaluating presence, I know that there's a number of different presence surveys out there. I know that there's theories of presence from Mel Slater, but I'm just curious from your perspective, like, which theories of presence that you think are the most compelling and then how you kind of evaluate that.
[00:06:56.171] Anthony Steed: That's a very good question. I should declare an interest. I was Mel's student, so the early work on presence, where we looked at things like using your body inside the environment, looking at representations, and early work on plausibility was things I did with him. I don't think anybody can really argue with the theory about plausibility Because the same theory could be used in the real world as well. It's just a way that you engage with situations you either believe them or you don't and actually when Mel was describing those types of thing I was thinking of What con artists do how people get convinced when scams that type of thing and the ways in for that? so I think the plausibility I think is unquestionably an issue because somebody might have a There's different ways in, you might have preconceptions about what's going to happen and therefore what you see in the virtual reality is implausible. Other media use plausibility in a very obvious way in that you usually build up a knowledge about what you're going to see. So if you go and see a Shakespeare play and you've never seen one before, you probably won't understand it. But you're probably not going to see just one in your life, you're going to see several and you're going to appreciate them over time. And as a novel media, as a young media, that's not what we have. We have people expecting to see something as if it's a sort of circus, a pantomime, because it's new. Its position at the moment is as novelty, as spectacle. And as it matures, it'll be, I like VR, these things are important to me, and this is what the medium's good at. So I think at the moment we're dealing a little bit with people grasping what causes presence, but actually what causes presence in the long term may be that they've seen VR, they've stuck with it and actually they're buying in. There are certainly some things that don't work. you do something that makes somebody disorientated or nauseous then it's going to make them think about themselves and think about not being in the virtual reality and I heard the phrase presence is fragile several times last week and I think that's certainly true and there's certain things that go wrong that can easily remind you But yeah, I think the two main points being that plausibility is something that's gained through experience in some senses. Otherwise, we've set ourselves too high a barrier. No virtual reality is at the moment like a real world. It's not that good. So we're setting up expectations. And the key thing is to think about how you present the virtual reality and how it almost as important as what you see inside is what you saw just before you went inside and I think there's a lot to learn there, a lot of cross-pollination of ideas from the games industry and also from the research industry.
[00:09:32.070] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just to expand a bit on Mel's theory is that there's the two major components of presence which are the place illusion, the sense that you're in another place. With virtual reality you get that a lot with the head track control, low latency, and just be able to walk around these virtual environments. And then the plausibility illusion is that the world makes sense, it's coherent, and the rules match your expectations in a certain way. But then there's also other dimensions that I've heard about talked about here Which is like present an environment then co-present with other people and then social presence with having other people within the environment giving you a sense that you're actually with other people and interacting and connecting with them and but also self-present so that you do have that sense of virtual body ownership illusion. So there's a lot of, to me, a lot of those different dimensions and with just Mel's thinking on the place illusion and plausibility illusion, I don't quite see how it is incorporating some of the social dimensions or if those are two different separate theories or if there's one that kind of combines all of the different aspects of presence.
[00:10:34.958] Anthony Steed: I have to think a little bit about that one. Mel's theory about place presence and plausibility, people over-analyse these two axes and I think there's certainly bits about place presence which are actually about plausibility in some senses and vice versa. I don't think it's a clear separation. There's certainly a part which is about being immersed and then things being correct within your sensor motor system changes, but that's not sufficient to be engaged in the environment. then I think of plausibility in the way that it's somebody continuing to engage in a way which makes sense to them or to an observer. So what we try and do is monitor what somebody does and then try and fit an explanation or get them to fit an explanation about why they did it. Nothing's implausible if they had a rationale for doing it. So it's not as if you can just go and say that that's implausible because the person just walked through the wall. They might not have seen the wall. They might have had their eyes closed and walked through it. It's not implausible unless there's a mental model that you can explain which is inconsistent with the environment or inconsistent with them performing with the environment. Now co-presence for me fits into that is that with plausibility in that if there is somebody in the environment then it's implausible not to interact with them. Obviously most people will interact with social cues so that they will respond to that. So the plausibility does work because it says that the plausible response to somebody walking up and sticking out their hand is to stick out their hand and introduce yourself. Because that's, in the West at least, a socially acceptable way of introducing yourself to a stranger. And that's actually an experiment we did many, many years ago in one of our very early presence experiments with Mel was having something come up to you and do the body mirror it. Well, you saw this avatar walk up and it put out its hand. The measure was just how many people raised their hand. So I think they do fit together, but plausibility is a massive area. I don't think we have a good handle on how you might turn that into an operational scheme for somebody who is interested in presence to go, what is plausible here? Because you've made a fantastic environment, and that person might have a good mental model about what's plausible here. One of the things you can look for, though, is their explanation, what they think is plausible, what they then do. fits with what you expect. So that's sort of a traditional sort of design-led approach to presence. You've got a purpose of the environment, and if somebody does something which you can't explain, you might say it's implausible, but also it gives you a very good point at which to say, well, did we just design something wrong? Did the system glitch? Which might be an obvious way for something to be implausible. You walk down a corridor, the screen goes black because you stepped on the cable. That's an implausibility because you're going to have to stop. and therefore your pattern of behaviour doesn't fit with what's the most plausible or in a set of reasonably plausible behaviours at that point. So yeah, I mean it's a long explanation, it was a long question, but I think the co-presence is a way of exercising plausibility in some sense. There are plausible responses and there are implausible responses. Unfortunately at the moment co-presence situations, unless it's a live avatar, so you've got an inhabited avatar, are usually quite short-lived. There's lots of demonstrations I've seen with people trying to create autonomous characters and co-presence just isn't working there. It's something I haven't seen a really good demonstration of that yet. Somebody's made a convincing autonomous avatar that you can feel as if you're present with because the babies aren't complex and there's some subtle cues missing. But as soon as you put somebody, at least a head and two hands waving around, it's almost as if you can infer the rest of the personality. So you immediately see some sort of constraints that you might impose on the social situation. You can sort of then reason that they're plausible responses because it would be implausible to then go and stand inside their head or try and step on their toes or something like that.
[00:14:25.573] Kent Bye: Yeah, to me, I think plausibility is like a huge area that could give a lot of insights into VR design in terms of thinking about how to make a coherent scene. Just an example, like a lot of basic social cues within NPCs, eye gaze, and trying to mimic a lot of social behaviors. So for you, what do you see as kind of like the applications of plausibility and what game designers can kind of take from the lessons of academia and start to create scenes that increase presence by focusing not so much on visual fidelity and graphics, but picking a sweet spot of fidelity where you have these plausible, coherent, believable virtual scenes and characters?
[00:15:05.168] Anthony Steed: Well, there's possibly two ways to get started. One is to look at a real situation and then analyze what goes on. And that could be just a layout of a place if you want somebody to learn about a particular task you might set it in a plausible looking environment because that may affect how they understand. So maybe an abstract task such as performing a particular medical procedure but it makes sense to put that in a plausible location rather than putting it in an abstract white box for example. The second way in, I think, is one of my favorite new terms I learned last week was brownboxing, which was physically making your app. So if you're going to make a VR, make a physical version first out of cardboard. And I think there you learn a lot because it's a sort of very traditional way of tackling a design. You make a prototype, and then you get somebody to talk aloud about what they're thinking while they're looking at it. So I think, again, that's a good tip. You might not do it with cardboard. You can do it inside your VR, but get people to talk aloud about what they're thinking. and see what they explain and so even if I was in a conference center if I say well I can see here I can think the exits are probably over there and over there and if you get them to rationalize about what they're thinking and what they're doing then you're learning what they think is plausible because they're telling you what they're seeing what they're experiencing and I think that's something which is again it's a traditional design traditional HCI technique but people can make a lot of Because what they're telling you is what's plausible. They're seeing something, they understand something about the history of the app, what you told them before they went in, and getting them to talk aloud about what they would do or what they considered doing is great. I mean, I'd love to do that in something like Job Simulator, because it's sort of full of plausible things. But if you got them to focus on a particular aspect, then you say, well, you could learn whether or not they're actually thinking that that's plausibly a phone. It's only got two buttons on, right? Yeah, it's plausibly a coffee machine. And I think that those techniques, although they're simple, are quite very helpful.
[00:17:01.522] Kent Bye: And so you were on a panel at GDC with a number of different academics talking to the game developer community a little bit about what the game developers can learn from academia. And then here at the IEEE VR, you're going to be doing the inverse panel, which is what the academic community can learn about gaming. And so what were some of the big takeaways that you got from what game developers can learn from academia at GDC?
[00:17:27.196] Anthony Steed: That's a good question, and we didn't really have a prior hypothesis before going into the panel. In retrospect, one of the things that struck me is that you can treat academic papers and the research results as if they're critiques of specific things in games, or a similar level, that this technique worked in this area for this particular application. So Doug Bowman gave an example of a particular selection technique that worked very well for a particular search problem. I think it was in a supermarket. finding a complex object. Now, that's not to say that he didn't recommend everybody use that, but if you've got a similar sort of set of constraints, then that worked for that application and you might consider prototyping it. The other thing that I think I hope to try and convey was that what's coming next and what the limitations are of what we know about the current system. So that's a little bit what I tried to talk about when I talked about latency. is that the current consumer systems are fantastic, but what's going to happen in five years? Where could that go? So, in particular, the driving down the latency and understanding what happens as you drive down latency. What we can learn from the games developers, well, the panel tomorrow One of the ways I'm going to explain this is the top 20 experiments that I think somebody's grad students run based on things I saw which struck me as good ideas in games and things which have emerged as sort of conventions that several people are using. If you told me three years ago that you were going to build a game and it was going to involve teleporting, I would have told you to think twice, because a lot of work has suggested that actually that's going to destroy spatial awareness. So if you're going to learn a map of an environment, teleporting around, theoretically, should be quite bad. But actually, for a game, it's great. So I've done it in several games and I've had a whale of a time. And I think somebody, it's not going to be a game developer, it's going to be somebody's grad student, should look at, and I think it would be very interesting to look at, what does that do to spatial awareness? So you can imagine not wanting to do that in a training simulator, where it's more important to learn the layout than if you were just playing the game. The second one, which I thought was great, and it was co-invention, was the Eagle Flight Ubisoft demo, where they have a narrowing of the field of view as you do turns to reduce the peripheral motion. And actually that's, somebody just presented a paper yesterday with a similar, a very similar idea. So it's sort of an idea which several people had at the time. So it would have been on my list if somebody hadn't actually presented a paper on it yesterday. And there are several other examples of things which I think turned out to be good ideas that have been transferred from somebody's demo to another demo and I think they're great and they're things that grad students who worked on that years ago didn't spot just because they were limited in number but we've got the tools to then go away and figure out what impact that has on people's perception or presence or engagement with the environment.
[00:20:17.279] Kent Bye: Yeah, there seems like to be this rapid iteration of trying to solve real problems within VR locomotion, within adventure games is something that a lot of people have had to try to crack that nut because they're motivated to actually explore these realms, but they don't have a real comfortable locomotion system that works for everybody. And so they've had to come up with a number of different constraints. And so I guess that kind of like asks a question of like, are there things that the academic community can facilitate a conversation or collaboration? Because it seems like at this point the game developers are just kind of pushing forward and innovating kind of despite all the years of research that have already been done.
[00:20:55.288] Anthony Steed: I wouldn't say despite, I mean there's common cause in that there are things that we know about locomotion which may concern non-games developers more than games developers, such as I mentioned one which is spatial awareness, that you learn the level more quickly. Now that may be of concern for a first person shooter player who wants to learn the maps really quickly, but obviously they get a long time to rehearse if they're going to learn the map. But if you're doing this as part of a training package, say for building operators or stadium operators, then efficiency of the training is much more of a concern. So I wouldn't say it's despite all this research, there are obviously different constraints. You may be much more concerned about somebody being able to tell the distance travelled in a motion. than simply having fun. I mean fun is a great metric and obviously in the game not being ill is by far the most important criteria so somebody finding it comfortable to do and efficiency of motion is the secondary one but I think that one as the systems get better the first one will hopefully become less of a problem and people will get slightly more subtle in the mechanisms so that they're more efficient for the person so they can commit how they want to travel and where they want to go more efficiently to the system For example a second one which I think is a delightful technique is this sticking to the eight main compass points as a way of not having rotation. I think that's great but it does mean that somebody's got to plan a little bit more to get somewhere because there may be obstacles on one of the routes so hopefully that's a good way of establishing comfort now. Maybe with a bit more research we can get rid of it in a couple of years but I think that everybody's invested in that problem because if you can solve that one a graduate student's going to get a job or at least a good paper.
[00:22:36.548] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that was one that I've seen a lot in terms of yaw rotation with just using a stick and kind of taking control over someone's gaze is something that for me is a big inducer of motion sickness. So yeah, the comfort mode, which is, you know, the Minecraft model, I think was doing a 22 degrees, and it ranges anywhere from 10 to 15, 22 degrees, but Instead of turning with a stick, you're using this kind of VR comfort mode, which I think was first brought about by Cloud Head Games a couple of years ago. But is that something that has also been researched or looked at in terms of the academic community?
[00:23:10.279] Anthony Steed: I don't think anybody researched it, but I think there's a couple of people who would hazard an explanation about why it works, which of course is important. I mean, you might design the technique and find out that it's very suitable but it's more obviously more generalizable if you have an explanation about why it works to do with say the frequency response of the vestibular system and the visual system meaning that you don't really want to do those rotations because there'll be a visual vestibular mismatch and if you do snap it that seems crude but is efficient because there's then no mismatch because the visual system can't detect isn't sensitive to that particular motion if it happens instantaneously. So I think that's one way to treat the scientific papers as well, is you might, I would encourage games developers to talk to the person that, you know, if they find they've come up with a technique that's worked well, is to do a bit of desk work to find out if anybody has research or just ask somebody, I'm happy to field questions. And there may be an explanation that can then generalize or show them what the limitations may be. There may be something that they can't test, which may make it more general or support different use constraints.
[00:24:14.935] Kent Bye: And so what was it like for you to be at GDC this past week then?
[00:24:18.400] Anthony Steed: Oh, it was a lot of fun. I have a little bit of a background in the games industry myself, so that's how I got into graphics, is developing games on a Sinclair ZX81, and then a Spectrum, and then an Atari ST, and writing demos. So I play games and I spent half a year working at Electronic Arts a few years ago. I think games is a great way of pushing the technology because people are demanding and gamers are demanding and the content levels are very high. We have some collaborations with some of the games companies. Being in London we're blessed with having quite a few around so I'm looking forward to hopefully running experiments in some people's major titles or at least their engines and some of their content so that we can start to explain our results in terms of things that people recognize would also show impact directly in a game or two.
[00:25:10.988] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:18.160] Anthony Steed: What is the ultimate potential of virtual reality? I don't know what the ultimate potential is. What I'm excited about is the ability for people to create things in virtual reality. I'm very excited about all these editors that people have got in there so people can create environments. They can share them with each other and I think that's a huge potential. I'm hoping that there will be a career of virtual storyteller so you can go in and create things that people can experience and it's a way of sharing stories and collaborating with people remotely. That's what motivates me and what our research is eventually targeted at ten years down the road is making telepresence and social presence sort of seamless. Ultimately, it's a way of solving energy problems, climate problems, to do with not using resources and doing things in virtual reality. So, yeah, that's what keeps me motivated to look at it as a new media. I'm convinced that aside from, you know, Grame is a wonderful motivator, but also it's a solution to some of the big societal problems we have.
[00:26:20.678] Kent Bye: And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:26:24.621] Anthony Steed: I'm looking forward to playing a lot of new content and using playing to show off our systems, to engage a new category of user. And I think there's a whole new wave of other applications. So I think games is a good way to explain to people what we're doing and why it's an interesting medium.
[00:26:44.714] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Anthony. Thank you. So that was Anthony Steed. He's a professor at the University of College London and is doing a lot of research within presence and plausibility as well as looking at how to incorporate some of the latest cutting-edge games into some of the research that he's conducting. So I have a number of different takeaways from this interview is that first of all I just wanted to point out that Anthony studied under Mel Slater and is actually one of the co-authors of one of the presence surveys that's out there. There's one called the Slater, Uso, and Steed presence survey. And there's another one called the Whitmer and Singer survey. So these are the standardized surveys that they give to people after they have a VR experience to figure out the level of presence that they were actually able to achieve within the experience. And so it was actually this interview where I was trying to get some answers about how social presence kind of fits into Mel Slater's conceptualization of the two major illusions of presence, which is, from Mel's perspective, the place illusion and the plausibility illusion. I had just had some experiences within VR where I felt like those two dimensions and axes weren't necessarily robust enough to really describe the different levels of presence that I have been experiencing in a lot of the most cutting-edge VR experiences that have been coming out over the last couple of years. And so still, even when listening to this interview, I still feel like that the ideas and conceptualizations of presence could be expanded. And since this interview, I've come up with what I think of as kind of the four different types of presence that you can achieve within VR. So the way I think about it is that there's an embodied presence where you actually feel like your body is within the experience. And this is what people typically talk about the virtual body ownership illusion or you're able to actually move your body around and feel like your body is actually there. But I think there's a lot of other dimensions in terms of haptics and other ways that you can actually feel like you're physically in your body. And then another dimension is the social presence. So feeling present with other people within an experience. And the way that had been described to me by other people who really have been studying social presence is that when you hang out with people in VR, it could kind of feel like you forget that you're in VR and it just feels like you're hanging out with other people. And I think that level of social presence kind of requires a number of different social cues. And there's different dimensions of just fidelity that you have to get to in order to actually get to that point of feeling like you have this social presence. Another type of presence is the active presence. And so this is something where when you're in Tilt Brush and you just are doing some sort of activity or you're using a tool within a 6DOF controller and you're moving your hands around, you get a different level of active presence that is specifically contrasted to the type of presence that you get from using an Xbox controller. I think you get a lot more sense of active presence when you're actually have your hands in the game and you're actually moving things around. And this is what the developers of Job Simulator, Alchemy Labs, they've called hand presence. When you actually pick up an object in Job Simulator, your hand actually disappears and that object or tool that you're then moving around then becomes the sole thing that is being controlled by your hand. And in some ways I think of this as a type of active presence where you're actively manipulating objects in the world in some way. And so the active presence, I think, is just that you get so caught up in the specific task that you're doing or the way that you're manipulating the world that it just gives you that extra dimension of presence. And the final level of presence that I'd say is emotional presence. So really engaging your emotions in a way that is indistinguishable from how you emotionally react in the real world. And I think a lot of the different VR experiences that are out there that really are focusing on emotional presence are these 360 degree videos. So a lot of experiences, Nani de la Peña with her Kia or with Clouds of Residua from within or Pearl. And so empathy, I think is a big dimension of this emotional presence. But I think there's also fun and joy and other types of experiences that you can describe as emotional. I think actually emotional presence is the one level of presence that is probably the most overlooked in terms of how to actually cultivate and generate that. I think it's usually coming through narrative or story, some way to kind of hook you in in some deeper level. But I think there could be other dimensions like, you know, perhaps having grief rituals within virtual reality or to be able to invite a space where people are able to be emotionally authentic, which I think that any application that starts to involve other people just kind of inherently starts to have an emotional dimension to it. And so these four different types of presence, I think, still fit within the framework of the place illusion and plausibility illusion. I think that you can still get a sense of being in a place and it being plausible, and that each of these four different types of presence are still accumulating in some way and contributing to this construction of plausibility and making it feel real and believable. And the thing that I'd say about all these different dimensions of presence is that in some ways in virtual reality you're taking out all these different components of presence and you're adding them back in one by one. In our day-to-day lives I think we kind of just inherently have all four of these different dimensions of presence that are kind of going on but yet when you go into VR you start to subtract things out in different ways and you start adding them back in. And so you start to really finely tune the types of presence that you're trying to optimize. But the more different types of presence that you have within your experience, I think the more level of immersion that you're going to be able to have. I think there's a lot of other interesting things that Anthony's looking at in terms of trying to integrate these big mainstream games into a lot of his presence research, doing distributed presence research, some of his thoughts about plausibility and how we actually have a sense of what's plausible in the real life too. And it's not just what's plausible in virtual reality. But he said that nothing's implausible if you have a rationale for why you're doing it. And so. It's kind of like the stories that we tell ourselves. And if it's a compelling story, then in some ways, we think that whatever we're experiencing is plausible. And I have to agree with his assessment that whenever you teleport around, you are destroying your spatial awareness. So it's a little bit of a trade-off between comfort and spatial awareness when you're trying to just get around. And when you're playing a game and it's fun, then there's no real harm in terms of destroying that spatial awareness. But I think the point that he makes is a good one in that there are maybe specific training situations in context where you actually do want to preserve that spatial awareness as part of the primary kind of training goals of whatever you're trying to train people to do. So I think it'll be interesting to see how the academic world and the gaming world will be able to collaborate moving forward. Because I do think that in some ways there are certain things that the gaming industry and the larger virtual reality consumer ecosystem is innovating so quickly that they have more access to money and resources to be able to push the field forward faster than what the academic world can be able to do. But I think it's still important to take some of the ideas and concepts within consumer VR and then have some of the research and studies to be able to prove out and find out some of these different trade-offs like, for example, teleportation versus spatial awareness and what are some of the implications of that. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for joining me and if you'd like to keep in touch then please do sign up for my email on voicesofvr.com and if you'd like to contribute to the podcast then please consider becoming a donor at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
