Scott Fisher

This panel was the tip of a very very big uncharted iceberg. All the guests had such different definitions and approaches of immersion in their work, it was difficult to connect the disparate ideas in so little time. It was almost like putting Magrite's painting of a green apple on a panel with an apple pie. Both apples, but so different.

Still, all the perspectives were interesting, and one could almost see each as it's own field of study. The one that interested me the most were the journalistic applications for immersive technologies. The example given, National Geographic's "Six Degrees", wasn't the best example. I would have been more interested in discussing Pryor's other project of shooting a broadcast news story with a 360 degree camera. This kind of project fascinates me because it completely changes the practice of journalism.

Until this point journalists job has been not only to tell 'the truth', but to fit the 'the truth' into a very small, constrained space. When that constrained frame (column inches, soundbite seconds, the frame of a photograph), is taken away, or at expanded exponentially, what is the job of the journalist? Is placing a camera in the middle of a news event, a journalistic job? 'News judgment' has always been considered a necessary skill to develop in this field, but is it now obsolete in an immersive space where the audience can truly choose where to look, and what is 'news worthy'. Perhaps the new constraint on journalists, isn't time or space, but attention. Journalists/media makers now have an expanded field of time and space to tell the story, but an audience's attention is still at a premium.

On the thorny issue of defining what immersion is, there were some insightful inroads into how the definition if bogged down by application:

1. Really real: there seems a consensus amongst the panelists that the obsession with realism/fidelity on one side and the mass adoption of ‘simulation’ as a VR ethos have shifted creator and user’s expectation of the possibilities towards an aesthetic of ‘movie special effects’. Rizzo mentioned that sliding realism down a bit in recreated war experiences helped the users to fill-in the missing details from their memory instead of being distracted by how little that place resembled a previously experienced space. This is a concept that Davies talked about with her art experiences emphasizing translucence and lack of detail. To do that is a more powerful experience in the way that it invites evocation rather than illustration in the mind of the user.

2. Interfacing: there’s something to be said about how using the metaphor of the hand to manipulate objects in VR environment reinforces a kind of corporeality that limits the possibility of other modes of interaction. In ‘Osmose’, Davies used the human body as interface: users interacted with the space through breath.

3. A sense of awe: there was a debate about how embodiment plays a part in the illusion of having a sense of being in a place. Davies seems to be beholden to the idea that the feeling of being enveloped in a space is essential to immersion. She recalls a personal experience of being in a diving tank and how visceral that was beginning with the feel of the weight of water on her body to being suspended in a deep blue space and how that invited a sense of wonder that is counter to the control-centric space of VR. Weil brought up the example of a more ‘democratic’ VR space that is Second Life and how it allows people to be ‘immersed ‘ in the act of social interaction and although it wasn’t wrapped around the users, it was every bit as real as being there.

One of the most interesting topics that came up was the question of what brings a sense of immersion to the user.

Char Davies made the argument that the state of immersion for a user does not arise simply from the technology used, but comes about from how the content of the piece speaks to the user. Often it seems to be assumed that a photoreal representation of the world presented in the latest cave environment or headmounted display is the closest we can get to immersion, but immersion is about the experience itself, not the simple recreation of the real world. A great painting can be a much more immersive experience than some virtual reality environments even though it lacks interactivity and the full utilization of our senses simply because the content speaks more directly to us as human beings. We also need to ask ourselves if the recreation of the real as the ultimate goal for immersion is what we want to strive for as artists within this medium, or if there is a higher goal for our expression within immersive media.

The technology used helps to facilitate the sense of immersion by more thouroughly enveloping all of the senses, but the only thing that will give people a true sense of being "there" in the virtual reality is the content itself. Content is not simply the storyline or the art as it is traditionally understood, but it is the sum total of the design of the visual, auditory, and other sense experiences. Also, the immersion is derived from but not about the recreation of the sensory experience, it is about the reexpression of human understanding through these experiences.

The "6 degrees" also impressed me a lot. The website tries to alarm the viewers about the deteriorative environment of the earth by broadcasting multimedia news which includes high-quality ideos,commentaries and pictures. The complicated website may confuse viewers at first; the way that pointing at certain part of the world map and then come out a multimedia information shares the idea with applications like mapper. It also made me think about the relationship between function and form. Do these complicated forms really helps expressing information? I'd like to extend this discussion to "Does VR really help something? Or does it just deliberately put people into the system by using new rules?" No matter how to answer this question seems all right. We did hard to find out the function of some new technologies; however it is this nondeterminacy indicates its potential. And maybe, function is not the most important thing.