Fragments from "Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory" by Maria-Laure Ryan /1994
...While "computer generated" accounts for the virtual character of the data, "immersive" and "interactive" explain what makes the computer-assisted experience an experience of reality. To apprehend a world as real is to feel surrounded by it, to be able to interact physically with it, and to have the power to modify this environment. The conjunction of immersion and interactivity leads to an effect known as telepresence:
Telepresence is the extent to which one feels present in the mediated environment, rather than in the immediate physical environment. . . . This [mediated environment] can be either a temporally or spatially distant real environment . . . or an animated but nonexistent virtual world synthesized by a computer.
Steuer, Jonathan. "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence." Journal of Communications, 1992.
Far from being restricted to VR, the features of immersion and interactivity can be regarded as the cornerstones of a general theory of representation and communication...
...Immersion
Since immersion depends on the vividness of the display, its factors are closely related to the devices that lead to realism in representation. A factor that comes immediately to mind is the projection of a three-dimensional picture. The introduction of perspective in painting took a first step toward immersion by creating a sense of depth that integrated the spectator into the pictorial space. But because the medium of painting simulates depth on a flat surface the spectator cannot break through the can vas and walk into the pictorial space. In the visual displays of VR the barrier disappears--there is no material plane of projection--and the user feels surrounded by a virtual world which can be freely "navigated" (as a standard metaphor of networking describes movement in cyberspace)...
... Immersion and Literary Theory ...
...The notion of pretense and the related concept of game of make-believe forms the core of Kendall Walton's theory of fiction. According to Walton, a fictional text--as well as any type of visual representation--is a "prop in a game of make-believe". The game consists of selecting an object and of regarding it as something else, usually in agreement with other players (author/reader, in the case of fiction.) Just as a stump may stand for a bear in a children's game of make-believe, the picture of a ship is taken for a ship, and the text of a novel is taken for an account of real facts (an account which may or may not be regarded as accurate, as the case of unreliable narration demonstrates). Players project themselves as members of the world in which the prop is a bear, a ship or a text of nonfiction, and they play the game by "generating fictional truths." This activity consists of imagining the fictional world according to the directives encoded in the prop. Some of the fictional truths concern the players themselves, or rather their fictional alter ego. The reader of a fiction does not simply generate truths of the type "P is fictional" but also "it is fictional that I believe P." And if "P" relates the pitiful fate of a character, it will be fictional that the reader's alter ego pities the character. The emotions experienced in make-believe in the fictional world may carry over to the real world, causing physical reactions such as crying for the heroine. The affinity of Walton's theory of fiction with virtual reality and its concept of immersion thus resides in his insistence on the participation of the appreciator in the fictional world. It is truly a theory of "being caught up in a story"...
Like computer-generated VR, possible-world and make-believe theories of fiction presupposes a relative transparency of the medium. The reader or spectator looks through the work toward the reference world. If the picture of a ship is experienced as the presence of a ship located in the same space as the viewer, it is not apprehended as "the sign of a ship." If readers are caught up in a story, they turn the pages without paying too much attention to the letter of the text: what they want is to find out what happened next in the fictional world. This reading for the plot focuses on the least language-dependent dimension of narrative communication. And if readers experience genuine emotions for the characters, they do not relate to these characters as literary creations nor as "semiotic constructs," but a complex human beings...
The literary devices which create a sense of participation in fictional worlds present many parallelisms with the factors leading to telepresence. One of the factors mentioned above was the projection of a three-dimensional environment. The literary equivalent of three-dimensionality is a narrative universe possessing some hidden depth, and populated by characters perceived as round rather than flat. By hidden depth I mean that the sum of fictional truths largely exceeds the sum of the propositions directly stated in the text. In a virtual world experienced as three-dimensional, the user knows that reality is not limited to what what can be seen from a given position: the outside conceals the inside, the front conceals the back, and small objects in the foreground conceal large objects in the background.
Similarly, in a narrative world presenting some hidden depth (let us call it a "realistic world") there is something behind the narrated: the characters have minds, intents, desires, and emotions, and the reader is encouraged to reconstruct the content of their mind--either for its own sake, or in order to evaluate their behavior. The procedures of inference relating to inner life would be inhibited in the case of the referents of human names in lyric poetry or in some postmodern novels where characters are reduced to stereotypes, actantial roles or allegories. When the reader feels that there is nothing beyond language, inference procedures become largely pointless.
As is the case in VR systems, the reader's sense of immersion and empathy is a function of the depth of information. It is obvious that detailed descriptions lead to a greater sense of belonging than sketchy narration. This explains why it is easier be be caught up in a fictional story than in a newspaper report. But in purely verbal communication--in contrast with the visual or auditory domains--depth of information may reach the point of saturation and create an alienating effect: the length and minute precision of the descriptions of a Robbe-Grillet, as well as their restriction to purely visual information, constitute a greater deterrent to immersion than the most laconic prose. Breadth of information is not literally possible in fiction, since we are talking about writing and not about multi-media communication. But insofar as it relays sensations through the imagination, literary language can represent the entire spectrum of human experience. This ability of language to substitute for all channels of sensation is what justifies the comparison of literature with a multi-media mode of communication such as VR.
Another factor of immersion that seems at first glance impossible in textual communication is the control of the sensors. The reader only sees (hears, smells, etc.) what the narrator shows. But to the extent that the narrator's sensations become the reader's, fiction offers a mobility of point of view at least as extensive as that of VR systems. The development of a type of narrator specific to fiction---the omniscient, impersonal narrator--has freed fictional discourse from the constraints of real world and pragmatically credible human communication. The disembodied consciousness of the impersonal narrator can apprehend the fictional world from any perspective (external observer point of view or character point of view), adopt any member of the fictional world as focalizer, select any spatial location as post of observation, narrate in every temporal direction (retrospectively, simultaneously, even prospectively), and switch back and forth between these various points of view. Fiction, like VR, allows an experience of its reference world that would be impossible if this reference world were an objectively existing, material reality
The ultimate freedom in the movement of the sensors is the adoption of a foreign identity. As Lasko-Harvill observes:
"in virtual reality we can, with disconcerting ease, exchange eyes with another person and see ourselves and the world from their vantage point"
Lasko-Harvill, Ann. "Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality." Discourse, 1992.
This "exchanging eyes with another person" is paralleled in fiction by the possibility of speaking about oneself in the third person, or of switching between first and third when speaking about the same referent. (Cf. Max Frisch, Montauk.) But there is an even more fundamental similarity between the role-playing of VR and the nature of narrative fiction. As authors strip themselves of their real world identity to enter the fictional world, they have at their disposal the entire range of conceivable roles, from the strongly individuated first person narrator (who can be any member of the fictional world) to the pure consciousness of the third person narrator.
Both VR and fiction present the ability to transcend the boundaries of human perception. Just as VR systems enable the user to penetrate into places normally inaccessible to humans, fiction legitimates the representation of what cannot be known: a story can be told even when "nobody lived to tell the tale." Of all the domain represented in fiction, no one transcends more blatantly the limits of the knowable than foreign consciousness. As Dorrit Cohn observes:
"But this means that the special life-likeness of narrative fiction--as compared to dramatic and cinematic fiction--depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind works, how another body feels"...
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting
Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.
...Against Immersion
Theories of fiction emphasizing participation in fictional worlds represent a somewhat reactionary trend on the contemporary cultural scene. Immersion in a virtual world is viewed by most theorists of postmodernism as a passive subjection to the authority of the world-designer--a subjection exemplified by the entrapment of tourists in the self-enclosed virtual realities of theme parks or vacation resorts (where the visitor's only freedom is the freedom to use his credit card). According to Jay Bolter, immersion is a trademark of popular culture:
"Losing oneself in a fictional world is the goal of the naive reader or one who reads as entertainment. Its is particularly a feature of genre fiction, such as romance or science fiction."
Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. The Computer,
Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.
As we have seen above, the precondition for immersion is the transparency of the medium. But we live in a semiotic age, in an age that worships signs. Contemporary theories such as deconstruction teach us that the freedom of the mind must originate in a freedom from signs. So does virtual reality, in some respect, but while VR seeks this freedom in the disappearance of signs, contemporary cultural theories regard signs as the substance of all realities and as the prerequisite of thought. Freedom from signs cannot be achieved through their disappearance but only through the awareness of their omnipresence, as well as through the recognition of their conventional or arbitrary character.
The aesthetics of immersion is currently being replaced--primarily in "high culture" but the tendency is now stretching toward popular culture--by an aesthetics of textuality. Signs must be made visible for their role in the construction of reality to be recognized. A mode of communication that strives toward transparency of the medium bereaves the user of his critical faculties. The semiotic blindness caused by immersion is illustrated by an anecdote involving the XVIIIth century French philosopher Diderot. According to William Martin:
"he tells us how he began reading Clarissa several times in order to learn something about Richardson's techniques, but never succeeded in doing so because he became personally involved in the work, thus losing his critical consciousness"
Martin, William. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986.
...Interactivity
Interactivity is not merely the ability to navigate the virtual world, it is the power of the user to modify this environment. Moving the sensors and enjoying freedom of movement do not in themselves ensure an interactive relation between a user and an environment: the user could derive his entire satisfaction from the exploration of the surrounding domain. He would be actively involved in the virtual world, but his actions would bear no lasting consequences. In a truly interactive system, the virtual world must respond to to the user's actions.
While the standard comparison for immersion derives from narrative fiction, the most frequently used metaphor of interactivity invokes theatrical performance. The simile captures a largely utopian dream of dramatic art: putting spectators on stage and turning them into characters:
"As researchers grapple with the notion of interaction in the world of computing, they sometimes compare computer users to theatrical audiences. "Users," the argument goes, are like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding of the action than simply the fine-tuning provided by conventional audience response. . . . The users of such a system are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles."
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theater. Menlo Park, Ca: Addison Wesley, 1991.
Whereas immersion may be a response to a basically static form of representation, interactivity requires a dynamic simulation. A simulative system does not simply respond to the user's actions by displaying ready-made elements, it creates its data "in real time" according to the user's directions. Like movies and narratives, a simulative system projects a world immersed in time and subjected to change, but while these media represent history retrospectively, fashioning a plot when all events are in the book, simulation generates events prospectively, without knowledge of the outcome. Taken as a whole, a simulative system does not reproduce a specific course of events, but like a "Garden of Forking Paths"--to parody the title of a short story by Borges--it is open to all the histories that could develop out of a given situation. Every use of the system actualizes another potential segment of history...
...The degree of interactivity of a VR system is a function of a variety of factors. Steuer enumerates three of them, without claiming that the list is exhaustive:
speed, which refers to the rate at which input can be assimilated into the mediated environment; range, which refers to the number of possibilities for action at any given time; and mapping, which refers to the ability of a system to map its controls to changes in the mediated environment in a natural and predictable manner.
Steuer, Jonathan. "Defining Virtual Reality:
Dimensions Determining Telepresence." Journal of Communications, 1992.
The first of these factors requires little explanation. The speed of a system is what enables it to respond in real time to the user's actions. Faster response means more actions, and more actions mean more changes. The second factor is equally obvious: the choice of actions is like a set of tools; the larger the set, the more malleable the environment. A VR system allowing an infinite range of actions would be like real life, except that in real life our choice of actions in a concrete situation is limit ed by pragmatic considerations. The factor of mapping imposes constraints on the behavior of the system. Insofar as "mapping" is defined in terms of natural response, it advocates the disappearance of arbitrary codes. Far from being associated with passive immersion, semiotic transparency is conceived by VR developers as a way to facilitate interactivity. The predictability of the response demonstrates the intelligence of the system. The user must be able to foresee to some extent the result of his gestures, otherwise they would be pure movements and not intent-driven actions. If the user of a virtual golf system hits a golf ball he wants it to land on the ground, and not to turn into a bird and disappear in the sky. On the other hand, the predictability of moves should be relative, otherwise there would be no challenge nor point in using the system. Even in real life, we cannot calculate all the consequences of our actions. Moreover, predictability conflicts with the range requirement: if the user could choose from a repertory of actions as vast as that of real life, the system would be unable to respond intelligently to most forms of input. The coherence of flight-simulation programs stems for instance from the fact that they exclude any choice of activity unrelated to flying. Meaningful interactivity requires a compromise between range and mapping and between discovery and predictability. Like a good narrative plot, VR systems should instill an element of surprise in the fulfillment of expectations...
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