Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They’ve also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world and share them with other people. Stephanie Mendoza is a VR developer and artist who has spent a lot of time creating worlds and exploring the gift economy dynamics within Anyland, and I had a chance to capture some of her stories and social experiments. She talks about the social status that comes with discovering bugs and glitches, documenting her adventures of agency expression and interactions with trolls, and how VR has been helping her have lucid dreams that have featured Anyland’s worldbuilding user interfaces.
AltSpaceVR held it’s final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd as they announced on July 27th that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of AltSpaceVR’s closing rippled throughout the VR community over the past week, and some are wondering if it’s any type of bellwether about the overall health of the VR ecosystem. There have been a number of discussion threads on Oculus subreddit, Vive subreddit, Twitter that had employees chiming in on imminent plans and the challenges of dealing with trolls and harassment in VR.
I dug through my archives of unpublished Voices of VR interviews to pull out a discussion that I had with Amber Roy in March 2016 talking about the AltSpaceVR JavaScript SDK that she was working on at the time. She ended up leaving AltSpaceVR in July 2016 to go to work at Oculus on the React VR framework, but this discussion we had before GDC 2016 highlights the technical innovations AltSpace made with integrating web technologies within their social spaces. AltSpaceVR may have been too early with their three.js integrations as WebVR will be finally officially launching on Firefox this August with the release on Chrome hopefully coming later this year.
At the end of this podcast wrap-up, I share some of my reflections and lessons learned from AltSpaceVR including if optimizing for both mobile & high-end PC was too limiting, the potential importance of more robust options for identity expressions and world building, the importance of virtual economies being built into large social VR applications, and the challenges around harassment in VR. I also compare and contrast AltSpace VR with other social VR applications including Rec Room, VRChat, High Fidelity, Anyland, BigScreen, JanusVR, Spaces, Project Sansar, vTime, WebVR, and Decentraland. Amber also talks about her AmberVR YouTube channel where she plays GearVR games, and the importance of promoting mobile VR applications.
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AltSpaceVR was a pioneer and innovator in the social VR space creating the first bridge between mobile VR and high-end VR, and they published a video of community members sharing their favorite memories within AltSpaceVR:
Here’s my previous six Voices of VR interviews with AltSpaceVR since May 2014:
Here’s a popular event featuring Reggie Watts and Justin Roiland Live in VR
One of their last big events was Bill Nye talking about 8 Principles About Everything
Finally, UploadVR’s David Jagneaux captured some of the final moments of AltspaceVR’s Good Bye party on August 3rd (although it was still online as of Friday afternoon, but could go offline at any moment).
Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it’s something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there’s something that’s lost when it’s translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music differently through her expressions as a dancer touring with David Byrne, and she wanted to experiment with using dance a form of embodied communciation within virtual reality. She teamed up with VR filmmaker Saschka Unseld to create Through You, which is an emotional and poetic experimental film that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with camera movements and over 200 edits.
I had a chance to catch up with Baldwin at the Sundance Film Festival where we talk about her refined perception of body language, how she used bodies moving through space to communicate visceral emotion, and how they’re pushing the limits of editing and camera movement within VR. Through You
was released on Gear VR through the Oculus Video app available in the Oculus Store on August 1st, and is now available. LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual real estate. They’re having an initial coin offering for the ERC-20 token MANA from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they’ll have up to 2 million plots of virtual land that will be sold for 1000 MANA. They hope to create a virtual city with different thematic districts that will help with content discovery.
The blockchain contract will contain a Bitorrent link or IPFS hash that contains the content for each virtual plot of land. They have a Unity plug-in, but are also planning on using A-Frame and other WebVR technologies to create their virtual city. They’ll be using using other blockchain technologies like district0x for secondary markets for reselling land, Aragon for distributed governance, uPort for self-sovereign identity Ethereum Name Service for human readable names. More specific architectural details are described in their Decentraland Whitepaper.
I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano in San Francisco to talk about how Decentraland is using blockchain technologies to manage their virtual world, and why it’s important to create artificial scarcity to help with the discovery of virtual worlds.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a mystical experience on the way back from being the sixth man to walk on the moon. After finding a description of his spiritual awakening experience as a “samadhi” within the ancient Vedas, he decided to start a science institution dedicated to studying the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is the “hard problem” in that there’s no widely accepted theory for how the mind is connected to the body, but IONS has been on the frontiers of researching this mind-body connection over the past 44 years.
They conducted a 10-year study researching the commonalities in different wisdom traditions that bring about a transformation of consciousness, and they published their findings in a book named Living Deeply. They’ve further refined a model of consciousness transformation, and are interested in applying virtual reality in invoking states of awe and exploring what types of latent human potentials might be unlocked.
I had a chance to catch up with Cassandra Vieten, the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to talk about how the vastness of awe leads to an experience that forces you to stretch your perspectives & accommodate new information. We also talk about how they’re starting to use virtual reality in their research, the impact on our environment and experiences in our lives, and the potential of unlocking latent human potentials through different contemplative practices & potentially mediated through technology.
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Here’s the model of consciousness transformation that IONS uses
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it’s power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University’s iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of invoking awe by using Google Earth VR. She was inspired by Frank White’s work on The Overview Effect, which documented the worldview transformations of many astronauts after they observed the vastness of the Earth from the perspective of space.
Quesnel wants to better understand of the overview effect phenomenon, and whether or not it’s possible to use immersive VR to induce it. Anecdotally, I think that it’s certainly possible as I reported my own experience of having a virtual overview effect in my interview with Google Earth VR engineers. She won the best 3DUI poster award at the IEEE VR conference for her study “Awestruck: Natural Interaction with Virtual Reality on Eliciting Awe.”
I had a chance to catch up with Quesnel at the IEEE VR conference in March where she shared her research into awe, how it can be quantified by verbal expressions, chills, or goose bumps, and how she sees awe as a catalyst for the transformative potential of virtual reality.
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Here’s a short video summarizing Quesnel’s research into using Google Earth VR to study the induction of awe.
Ida Benedetto is an experiential designer who has developed a framework she calls “Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. She started curating Trespass Adventures, which were private & exclusive one-off immersive theater experiences at abandoned properties. The tension that came with transgressing boundaries carried a level of risk that proved to be a key ingredient for participants having some profoundly transformative experiences. If she started to remove these risks from the experiences, then they weren’t nearly as tantalizing or charged with transformative potential.
Benedetto was most interested in the aspects of human enrichment that came from these experiences, and decided to explore and conduct an anthropological study of other transformative experiences including sex parties, funerals, and outdoor adventures. She discovered that each of these experiences have some dimension of risk, whether it’s the physical risk of an outdoor adventure, the emotional risk of grieving the loss of a loved one, or the social risk of shame and humiliation of being rejected for expressing your desires at a sex party. She also found that transformation doesn’t happen unless you are able to let go of control in areas where you usually have control, which is a similar finding that Robin Arnott discovered with SoundSelf. Analyzing the risks associated with these different experiences is insightful for exploring the limits of how far how equivalent experiences in virtual environments will be able to go, especially when it comes to situations where our physical safety is threaten by the forces of nature.
I had a chance to talk with Benedetto about the components of her experiential design framework, how these design concepts apply to virtual reality, the relationship of awe to transformation, other models of transformation, how to handle trauma in intense experiences, and the primal insights that come from contemplating sex, death, and survival.
Dustin Chertoff has pulled experiential design insights from the advertising world to come up with a more holistic theory of presence in virtual reality. In 2008, he was in graduate school and was dissatisfied with the major theories of VR presence. His gaming experience showed him how much of his feeling of immersion was related to the content of the game. He wrote an essay published in the journal Presence where he laid out what he saw were the two major limitations of VR presence theory at that time, “First, many models tend to focus heavily on perceptual issues while focusing less attention other facets of virtual experiences, such as cognition and emotion.” Second, “these models fail to provide an interpretable, extensible framework with which to understand and apply the theoretical principles to practical applications.”
Chertoff finished his Ph.D. thesis titled “Exploring Additional Factors of Presence” in 2009, and then published his Virtual Experience Test questionnaire in the 2010 proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. Presence researcher Richard Skarbez first alerted me to Chertoff’s work after I asked him if he’d seen any prior research into presence looking at the different dimensions of my elemental theory of presence, which breaks down the subjective quality of an experience of VR into different combinations of Embodied Presence, Emotional Presence, Active Presence, and Social & Mental Presence. I was encouraged to see that Chertoff had independently come to an identical framework through his survey that was designed to holistically “measure virtual environment experiences based upon the five dimensions of experiential design: sensory, affective, active, relational, and cognitive.”
I had a chance to catch up with Chertoff in San Francisco during GDC this year, and we each concluded that our experiential design frameworks are functionally equivalent. We talked about his FearlessVR company that he co-founded where they design VR exposure therapy experiences for different phobias, but we spend the bulk of our discussion exploring how he came to looking to looking at the field of experiential design to inform presence theory. We also compare and contrast how each of our experiential design frameworks create tradeoffs and amplify different qualitative dimensions of an experience.
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Chertoff’s Ph.D. thesis “Exploring Additional Factors of Presence” has a great survey of presence research (see his summary graphic down below), as well as inspiration he’s drawn from flow theory and video game design frameworks like GameFlow. He summarizes Forlizzi and Battarbee’s definition of “experience” by saying it’s “something that can be articulated, named, and schematized within a person’s memory. Experiences of this type have beginnings and ends, but anticipation of, and reflection on, the experience may take place before or after the event.”
The idea of experiential design is that deeply immersive experiences form stronger memories, and that it’s easier for us to store new information along when we’ve had related experiences. Chertoff says, “Experiential designs are successful when they encourage people to create meaningful emotional and social connections—personal narratives that involve episodic memories, and positive associations with the artifacts of that experience.”
Chertoff cites Joseph Pine & James Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy as his source of inspiration for the five dimensions of his experiential design framework that make for a memorable and immersive experience, which map nicely over to my elemental theory of presence.
Embodied Presence corresponds to Chertoff’s sensory dimension which he says “includes all sensory input—visual, aural, haptic, and so forth — as well as perception of those stimuli.” I’d also include different virtual body representations, as well as the virtual environmental components which help transport you into another world and trick your perceptual system into believing that you’re in another world. Most presence researchers research embodied presence as virtual reality uniquely stimulates our sensorimotor aspects of perception beyond what any other communications medium can do.
Emotional Presence corresponds to the affective dimension which “refers to a participant’s emotional state. For simulation, this dimension can be linked to the degree to which a person’s emotions in the simulated environment accurately mimic his or her emotional state in the same real-world situation.” For me, this includes the storytelling and narrative components as well as music, colors, symbols, and deeper myths that all engage the emotions. Emotional presence can also come into the experience through social engagement with other people.
Mental Presence corresponds to the cognitive dimension, which “encompasses all mental engagement with an experience, such as anticipating outcomes and solving mysteries. For simulation, much of the cognitive dimension can be interpreted as task engagement, [which] is related to the intrinsic motivation, meaningfulness, and continuity (actions yielding expected responses) of an activity.” Game designers often talk about mental friction, and if there isn’t something in an experience to stimulate your mind then you’ll risk getting bored.
Social Presence corresponds to the relational dimension, which is “composed of the social aspects of an experience. For simulation, this can be operationalized as co-experience — creating and reinforcing meaning through collaborative experiences… Experiences that are created or reinforced socially are usually stronger than individual experiences and they further enable individuals to develop personal and memorable narratives.” I combine mental & social presence into the air element, because they both deal with the abstractions of thought and communication. But it also emphasizes the fact that not every experience has to have a social dimension to it, and that solitary experiences can be just as immersive and engaging to your mind.
Finally, Active Presence corresponds to the active dimension, which Chertoff described in the interview the degree to which you can express your agency, and physical engagement through taking action within the experience. He also sees it as a form of subjective engagement by saying “Does he or she incorporate the experience into his or her personal narrative; does he or she form meaningful associations via the experience?”
Chertoff assigns a few things to the active dimension that I would categorize elsewhere. For example, I think empathy is more of a function of emotional engagement, and that connection to the environment, avatars, and identity are more related to embodied presence. I tend to think of active presence being primarily as an expression of agency and will that includes exploration, curiosity, creativity, physical or virtual locomotion, and any type of interactivity.
There are qualitative dimensions of an experience that are sometimes hard to clearly schematize into a single category, and I believe that all of these different dimensions are happening at the same time all the time. But I do see that there are tradeoffs between active presence and emotional presence that I explore in much more detail in this introductory essay about elemental theory of presence..
A Survey of Presence Research
Chertoff has a lot of other references to presences research, the evolution of experience economies, insights from the user-system-experience (USE) model of user-centered design, as well as combining game design theory with flow theory with GameFlow.
Here’s a summary graphic of Chertoff’s survey of presence research as of 2009, where he summarizes the major components of presence in the different major models:
Chertoff argues that a lot of these models don’t have a good conceptual framework that can account for role of content in cultivating a sense of immersion and presence, and he sees that Experiential Design and Flow Theory can fill in those gaps.
Flow theory shows the relationship between the objective skills of a user and the objective challenges within an experience that result in a variety of different internal subjective states in the user.
When the skill and challenge is low, then that can lead to apathy or boredom. When the challenges are high, but the skill is low, then it can create anxiety or arousal. Flow states happen in a sweet spot of high skill of the user and high challenge within the experience.
Flow theory connects the objective aspects of an experience to the internal states of a subject, and it’s also helping to evolve existing user-centered design models. Most user-centered design research has focused on the usability of an interface with a specific productive output, but for gaming the experience of playing the game being the reward itself and so it’s more about the playability of the game and whether or not it helps the player achieve a flow state. Flow theory has been applied to Game Design in the GameFlow theory, which shows the role of content in creating a sense of immersion and presence.
Finally, I think it’s important these two experiential design frameworks are independent of virtual reality, and they can be applied to creating any human experience. Pine & Gilmore wrote a prescient article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” in the Harvard Business Review in 1998, and they say, “We expect that experience design will become as much a business art as product design and process design are today. Indeed, design principles are already apparent from the practices of and results obtained by companies that have (or nearly have) advanced into the experience economy.”
I’ve talked before about how Snapchat shows how we’re moving from the Information Age to the Experiential Age, and this article from 1998 lays out some of the economic trends that led experiential design paradigms used by companies like Starbucks and Apple. Here is a graphic from Pine & Gilmore’s article that describes the fundamental characteristics of this new experience economy that is moving from delivering intangible & customized services on-demand to staging memorable & personal experiences that are revealed over a duration of time.
Virtual and augmented reality technologies are driving our culture towards having more and more immersive experiences, and learning how to holistically create immersive and memorable experiences is going to continue to become a vital part the future of our economy and our culture.
VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we’re transported into another world, and that what is happening is real. He breaks this into two primary illusions where the Place Illusion answers the question “Am I there?” and the Plausibility Illusion answers the question “Is this happening?” These two illusions happen inside of your mind and are very difficult to study, but Slater has develop an experimental research protocol that draws inspiration from color theory research the combination of the objective spectral distribution as well as an individual’s subjective perception of color.
After seeing well over a thousand VR experiences, I started to cultivate my own ideas about an Elemental Theory of Presence that describes different qualities of Embodied Presence, Social & Mental Presence, Active Presence, and Emotional Presence. Slater says that these different qualities of experience are more related to the content of the experience, and that they’re not unique to virtual reality. You can be just as emotionally engaged with a movie or a book as you are with a VR experience, and so looking at how the content contributes to his conceptualization of presence isn’t an interesting research question trying to figure out what’s unique about VR.
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My elemental theory of presence is more of an elemental framework for experiential design that’s isn’t unique to VR, but it has been useful in helping to understand the component parts of a VR experience. Slater is primarily interested in researching the objective and measurable dimensions of a VR experience that contribute to the place illusion and plausibility illusion that he sees are the primary factors of the subjective feeling of presence. I personally don’t believe that you disregard the role content in how it helps cultivate a feeling of presence, but I acknowledge that it’s a difficult thing to study in controlled academic research environment. There is not a universal formula for what combination of content and experience ingredients that will help you achieve a sense of presence whether you are in VR or not. There are limits to predicting the degree to which a piece of content will resonate with someone, and the successful approaches are usually market-based solutions that big data collections of behavior to drive the content recommendation algorithms at Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google.
My interview with Slater explores the threshold of the boundaries of his theory of presence as I try to understand it through the lens of my own elemental framework of experiential design. He cites NASA’s Stephen Ellis who once said that any good theory of presence will provide a series of tradeoffs that allows you to make choices amongst features that are within the same “equivalence class.” Slater’s approach to presence focuses on the objective features of the VR system while my elemental theory of presence focuses on the qualitative aspects of the specific content. Slater says that it’s a completely valid approach, but that it’s just completely different than what he’s interested in looking at. This conversation clarified for me the differences between objectively controllable VR hardware & software variables and the specific content of a VR experience. I think that both contribute different things to the subjective feelings of presence, and experiential designers will have to take into account both the objective features of the VR hardware and software as well as the specifics of the content in order to create the qualities of presence that they’re striving for.
Want to discuss more about this podcast? I’m having an experimental discussion about it with my Patreon members here.
Mel Slater’s Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you’re transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what’s happening in that world is believable). Presence researcher Richard Skarbez thinks of these two components as “immersion” and “coherence,” and we previously discussed his presence research where he found that both illusions are vital for a deep sense of presence. The place illusion is largely enabled by the objective details of the VR technology with features such as 1:1 head tracking, low latency, and large field of view. But all of the different dimensions of what makes an experience plausible are still widely unknown, not very well researched, and also difficult to isolate and determine.
Skarbez was back at the IEEE VR conference in March of 2017 showing some of his efforts to break down presence into different factors that included interactions with virtual humans, high-end VR tracking to get fully immersive body tracking, interaction abilities within the environment, as well as whether or not the scenario was coherent and believable. He also deployed a new research method where the subject would experience the full fidelity of the screen, and he’d slowly dial up the fidelity of these different factors to determine which ones were the most helpful in cultivating presence. Presence surveys are not that great at aggregating multiple individual subjective rating the degree of presence on any type of scale, but you can judge relative degrees of presence based upon your own previous experiences. Skarbez was able to determine that full body tracking was one of the biggest indicators of the depth of presence that someone felt within their experiment.
I had a chance to catch up with Skarbez in Los Angeles at the IEEE VR conference where we talked about his presence research as well as how his different components of presence plausibility mapped over to my Elemental Theory of Presence.
Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They’ve also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world and share them with other people. Stephanie Mendoza is a VR developer and artist who has spent a lot of time creating worlds and exploring the gift economy dynamics within Anyland, and I had a chance to capture some of her stories and social experiments. She talks about the social status that comes with discovering bugs and glitches, documenting her adventures of agency expression and interactions with trolls, and how VR has been helping her have lucid dreams that have featured Anyland’s worldbuilding user interfaces.
I dug through my archives of unpublished Voices of VR interviews to pull out a discussion that I had with 
The blockchain contract will contain a Bitorrent link or IPFS hash that contains the content for each virtual plot of land. They have a Unity plug-in, but are also planning on using A-Frame and other WebVR technologies to create their virtual city. They’ll be using using other blockchain technologies like 
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is it’s power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. 
VR Presence researcher 
