Immersive technology
Definition
"Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment."[1]
Immersive technology is the general term for systems designed to produce that state: virtual reality, augmented and mixed reality, spatial audio, projection environments, haptics, and combinations of these.
Immersion Versus Presence
Research in the field distinguishes two things the word "immersion" is often used for, and keeping them apart clarifies a great deal.
Immersion, in Mel Slater's influential usage, is an objective property of a system: field of view, resolution, tracking latency, degrees of freedom, sensory channels engaged. It can be measured with instruments and compared between devices.
Presence is the subjective response — the feeling of being there, and the tendency to behave as though the virtual situation were real. Presence is what designers actually want, and it correlates with immersion but is not determined by it. A low-fidelity environment with consistent, low-latency response to head movement produces more presence than a photorealistic one that lags, because what convinces the body is not image quality but the reliability with which the world responds to its own movement. This is the practical form of the argument Mark Hansen makes theoretically in Bodies in Code.
The corresponding failure is break in presence: the moment when a wire, a notification, a tracking glitch or a wall reasserts the physical situation.
Kinds of Immersive Technology
- Virtual reality. A synthetic environment replacing the visual and usually auditory field, whether head-mounted or projected, as in the CAVE systems developed at the University of Illinois from 1992.
- Augmented reality. Synthetic material registered to and overlaid on the physical world, from Ivan Sutherland's 1968 head-mounted display onward.
- Mixed reality. Systems in which physical and virtual objects interact, a continuum formalised by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino in 1994.
- Spatial and binaural audio. Frequently more effective per unit of computation than graphics at producing presence, and much less discussed.
- Haptics and force feedback. The channel that most directly addresses proprioception, and the least mature.
Char Davies and Osmose
The most-cited artistic work in the field is Char Davies's Osmose (1995), an immersive environment navigated not by joystick but by breath and balance: the immersant rises by inhaling and falls by shifting the body's centre. Davies designed it explicitly against the prevailing conventions of virtual reality — against hard-edged Cartesian space, against the gun-and-cursor interface, against the fantasy of leaving the body — and it is the standard reference for an alternative tradition in which immersion returns attention to embodiment rather than escaping it. Davies also popularised the term immersant for a participant.
Related Articles
External Links
- Immersive Tech Summit. On 21 October 2010 a summit on immersive technology was held at the Los Angeles Center Studios to showcase practitioners in the field and collaborate on themes of innovation, applications and future development.
- Immersion (virtual reality)
Related Reading
- Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
- Extended Avatar
- Snow Crash
- The Pleasure of the Interface
