Virtual Reality

This sweeping introduction to the science of virtual environment technology masterfully integrates research and practical applications culled from a range of disciplines, including psychology, engineering, and computer science.

The article is an attempt at collecting some views on ontology of virtual reality (VR). Two types of definitions of virtual reality are discussed and compared: technological (concentrated on technical features of VR) and psychological (concentrated on people’s experiences with VR). In the paper features of virtual reality such as: interaction, artificiality, simulation, full body immersion, networked communications, telepresence and immersion are presented as forming differentia specifica of virtual reality. The main studied issues are ontological problems connected with virtual reality (...) especially ontological status of virtual objects. The main views on this subject are presented: 1) virtual objects are simulations of real objects, 2) some virtual object are as real as their equivalents in the reality (conception of Philip Brey based on Searle's social ontology), 3) virtual worlds as constructions of human mind. Virtual reality shades new light on some classical philosophical problems. In the paper two of them are discussed: 1) distinction between reality and appearances and 2) relations of the real world to a virtual one. (shrink)

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history ; we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently (...) living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is (...) false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. (shrink)

Is virtual reality the latest grand narrative that humanity has produced? This book attempts to disentangle the common characteristics of human reality and posthuman virtual reality by examining discourses on psychoanalysis, gene-technology, globalization, and contemporary art.

The virtual annuls all suspension of time that could, through its tragic or stylistic character, confer to time an existential value. This condition is contrasted with time as it functions in dreams. On the grounds of these observations it is shown that there are resemblances between “autistic” symptoms and the virtual world.

There is an ongoing debate about the value of virtual friendship. In contrast to previous authorships, this paper argues that virtual friendship can have independent value. It is argued that within an Aristotelian framework, some friendships that are perhaps impossible offline can exist online, i.e., some offline unequals can be online equals and thus form online friendships of independent value.

The borders between the physical and the virtual are ever-more porous in the daily lives of those of us who live in Internet enabled societies. An increasing number of our daily interactions and transactions take place on the Internet. Social, economic, educational, medical, scientific and other activities are all permeated by the digital in one or other kind of virtual environment. Hand in hand with the ever-increasing reach of the Internet, the digital and the virtual, go concerns about trust. In (...) the increasing numbers of cross-disciplinary attempts to understand the way that the Internet is changing our societies, ‘trust’ is a truly cross-boundary word, used just as frequently by computer scientists as it is by economists, sociologists and philosophers. Concerns in the name of trust are articulated about the objects and artefacts found, accessed or bought on the Internet, about the people with whom we interact on the interact, and about the technological systems and infrastructures that enable us to carry out activities of different types. -/- This paper reflects on the implications for trust of the way we shape our technologies and they in turn shape us, for example, in the way we trust and the extent to which we can trust ourselves as trusters. The account I am working towards is an ecological and co-evolutionary view of trust and technologies, which attempts to hold in view the complex inter-relationships between the agents and other entities within and across environments. First, I consider the ways in which problems of justifying trust are analogous to problems of justifying knowledge, and claim that trust, like knowledge, cannot be justified from an external position. Second, I outline an account of internal relations drawn from phenomenology. This is followed by a discussion of three aspects of trust which are internally related to it: value, reason and morality. (shrink)

The Matrix presents a version of an old philosophical fable: the brain in a vat. A disembodied brain is floating in a vat, inside a scientist’s laboratory. The scientist has arranged that the brain will be stimulated with the same sort of inputs that a normal embodied brain receives. To do this, the brain is connected to a giant computer simulation of a world. The simulation determines which inputs the brain receives. When the brain produces outputs, these are fed back (...) into the simulation. The internal state of the brain is just like that of a normal brain, despite the fact that it lacks a body. From the brain’s point of view, things seem very much as they seem to you and me. (shrink)

Abstract. Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: (...) the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity. Given its key role and the rate at which new approaches to understanding and examining presence are appearing, this chapter draws together current research on presence to provide an up to date overview of the most widely accepted approaches to its understanding and measurement. (shrink)

The term “virtual reality” was first coined by Antonin Artaud to describe a value-adding characteristic of certain types of theatrical performances. The expression has more recently come to refer to a broad range of incipient digital technologies that many current philosophers regard as a serious threat to human autonomy and well-being. Their concerns, which are formulated most succinctly in “brain in a vat”-type thought experiments and in Robert Nozick's famous “experience machine” argument, reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that (...) such technologies would probably have to work. They also considerably underestimate the positive contributions that virtual reality technologies could make to the growth of human knowledge. Here, we examine and critique Nozick's claim that no reasonable person would want to plug into his hypothetical experience machine in light of a broadly enactivist understanding of how future VR technologies might be expected to function. We then sketch out a tentative theory of the phenomenon of truth in fiction, in order to characterize some of the distinct epistemic opportunities that VR technologies promise to provide. (shrink)

What is an avatar -- More than just another pretty face : the avatar effect -- Interview with the virtual cannibal -- Virtual presence -- X-reality, a conclusion.

Critics and researchers apply various criteria to evaluate the efficacy of VR, including the conformity of VR environments to the character of place. I wish to add a further test: do VR environments enable thought? The paper thus applies to VR the controversial proposition advanced by Clark and others that thinking, i.e. human cognitive processes, are situated and spatial. As a further term in this mix I introduce the concept of non-place, as elucidated by Augé and propose that non-places can (...) be characterized as unthinking spaces, i.e. spaces that provide little assistance to the thought processes of their occupants. Perhaps non-places only offer thepossibilities afforded by a kind of cognitively impoverished instrumentalism. The conclusion from these propositions is that it is instructive to couch the problematics of VR environments in terms of non-places that do not easily accommodate thought, or thoughtful interaction, were it not that thought thrives on transitions, thresholds and boundary conditions between the strange and the familiar. (shrink)

Realistic uses of Virtual Reality technology closely integrate user training on virtual objects with VR-assisted user interactions with real objects. This paper shows how the Interactive Theory of Perception may be extended to cover such cases. Virtual objects are explained as concrete models that have an inner generation mechanism, and the ITP is used to explain how VR users can both perceive such local CMs, and perceptually represent remote real objects. Also, concepts of modeling and representation are distinguished. The paper (...) concludes with suggestions as to how the ITP methodology developed here could be extended to iconic external representations and models generally. (shrink)

Presents a broad examination of the nature of virtual worlds and the potential they provide in managing and expressing information practices through that medium, grounding information professionals and students of new media in the fundamental elements of virtual worlds and online gaming. The book details the practical issues in finding and using information in virtual environments and presents a general theory of librarianship as it relates to virtual gaming worlds. It is encompassed by a set of best practice methods that (...) libraries can effectively execute in their own environments, meeting the needs of this new generation of library user, and explores ways in which information literacy can be approached in virtual worlds. Final chapters examine how conventional information evaluation skills work falls short in virtual worlds online. (shrink)

The law has neither defined cyberspace nor its values. As a result, the attempt to apply legal rules of "ordinary" space to cyberspace fails to address either the ordinary or the extraordinary features of the new space. This Article proposes that cyberspace be defined as an embodied switched network for moving information traffic, further characterized by degrees of access, navigation, information-activity, augmentation (and trust). Legal conflicts, whether sounding in contract, trademark, copyright, personal jurisdiction, choice of law, or some other basis, (...) occasionally occur in an objective cyberspace whose values can be sufficiently operationalized for legal analysis. If cyberspace were so defined, the law could better respond to new technological uses. (shrink)

This is a follow-up article toPhilip Brey's ``The ethics of representation andaction in Virtual Reality'' (published in thisjournal in January 1999). Brey's call for moreanalysis of ethical issues of virtual reality(VR) is continued by further analyzing issuesin a specialized domain of VR – namelymulti-user environments. Several elements ofBrey's article are critiqued in order to givemore context and a framework for discussion.Issues surrounding representations ofcharacters in multi-user virtual realities aresurveyed in order to focus attention on theimportance of additional discussion andanalysis of (...) specialized aspects of VR. (shrink)

The development of multi-user, three-dimensional, graphical, persistent, synchronous, computer environments---such as multi-user virtual realities---has raised a variety of difficult ethical problems. These issues include tensions between virtual and real communities, good ways of representing oneself and one's environment, and balancing design values, appropriate behavior and social impacts. In order to have good policies, appropriate use, and quality development for these environments, we must explore both their technological and moral aspects. We must not take for granted the nature of either electronic (...) interactions or the electronic spaces. I use the population of those with paraplegia and quadriplegia to explicate various potential benefits and harms as well as to explore ways in which the virtual worlds impact the understanding of the self. (shrink)

Roxanne Kurtz has argued that the "virtual rape" of a character in a computer-generated world (an avatar) shares many (though obviously not all) of the wrong-making features of physical rape in the real world. I agree in part, but argue that, due to the typical features of virtual worlds, its wrongfulness is dominated by the harm it does to the avatar user's capacity for social interaction and self-representation. In the course of the argument I hope to shed more light upon (...) the nature of avatars, and their relationship to "offline" avatars in, e.g., role-playing and children's games. (shrink)

This paper explores notions of realism, evidence, undecidability and faith in the context of our relationship with images following the digital revolution and the transition from a culture of analog photographic and filmic records to the new space-time of virtual reality. The argument provide a reappraisal of modern and post-modern conceptions of the photographic image and of film, which have queried the inherent realism of the indexical photographic sign, and have highlighted the fraught ontological and temporal nature of images supposed (...) to document and extend our perceptual relationship to reality, beyond the confines of time. The films discussed in this paper include: Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Chris Marker's La jetée, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad and You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love. (shrink)

How do we know and understand who we really are as human beings? The concept of 'the self' is central to many strands of psychology and philosophy. This book tackles the problem of how to define persons and selves and discusses the ways in which different disciplines, such as biology, sociology and philosophy, have dealt with this topic. Richard S. Hallam examines the notion that the idea of the self as some sort of entity is a human construction and, in (...) effect, a virtual reality. At the same time, this virtual self is intimately related to the reality of ourselves as biological organisms. Aiming to integrate a constructionist understanding of self with the universalizing assumptions that are needed in natural science approaches, this text is unique in its attempt to create a dialogue across academic disciplines, while retaining a consistent perspective on the problem of relating nature to culture. (shrink)

It is shown that a hypothesis about gravity having a virtual cause implies there are two primary reference frames, a reality and a functional virtual reality and an equivalence principle relating the two is postulated. A mathematical expression relating the primary reference frames to the state of reality provides an explanation of particle-wave duality and resolves the controversy about the speed of gravity. A model for motion, time and particle formation is briefly discussed, in which the hypothesis about the virtual (...) cause of gravity and supporting postulates are valid. It is further shown that such model provides solutions to unsolved paradoxes and a unification of consistent but contradictory ancient theories of matter and motion. Finally, a reference is made about the basis for devising experiments and testing the predictions of the model. (shrink)