Post 02 Reading Response
- Kiki Wu
- Sep 17, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 1, 2019
Reading List:
Chapter 1 “What It Is, Where to Find It, How to Stay There,” in Future Presence, by Peter Rubin
Thought...
We tend to relate VR to game, to psychological therapy and to immersive storytelling. However, VR doesn’t give birth the things above, but somehow enhances their functionalities and enriches the experience with more information at the same amount of time. Also, the nature of the new media tech extends human physical ability/limit, which contributes to that experience enrichment.
This week’s readings remind me of Marshall McLuhan’s book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, where he brought up this famous phrase “The medium is the the message”. He wrote that the medium is the tunnel where message transmits is more critical to study than the meaning of the contents. Similarly, in the “Future Presence", Peter Rubin gave the example of the movie “Up”, where the immersive viewing experience is not from the contents itself, but the camera perspective and the audiovisual theater equipments. It is the characteristics of the medium that shape our perceptions of the contents, because by the end of the day, human beings might have repetitively stating the similar manifesto for hundreds of years. For example, bread is present almost in every culture with simple mix of flour, water and yeast, and however it is the local water in New York makes the bagel authentic, different from bread in other places.
Further, VR as a new media technology seems to bring us a new reality, which is virtual from the ground reality we consider as real. Like the Rubin said, a photo, a video game or a movie is an artificial reality, and only the physical presence marks the difference from ground reality. However, “an experience doesn’t have to look exactly like real life in order to be immersive”, and I think human empathy plays a big part of it which enable us to think and feel in the whatever medium/content/character’s perspective as we are physically present. VR is usually set to first-person perspective, which gives users a lot more agency to explore the world, absorb information and shape opinions.
Interestingly, Rubin drew an idea from The International Society of Presence Research that human sometime will overlook the technology that they are using. I think human brain can process information quickly, and if the artificial world is weakly designed with less details, we tend to finished the exploring and get back to the ground reality very fast. However, if the artificial world is interesting and filled with details or puzzles that keep drawing our attentions, we might not be able to notice the technology we are using (Psychologically speaking, human can not multitask but shifting attention from one item to another fast enough to cheat oneself that he/she can multitask).
In short, though we like to discuss how “real” this virtual reality work is, I think it is more important to consider why we would expect something artificial to be real, which is often the motivation for next technological innovation. Perhaps, we wants to have more control over the environment, not the motherland natural environment, but the subjective environment — the perceptible information around us. From mass media to self-generated content platform, and from traditional ad billboard to niche marketing, we are focusing more on individual life experience, where societal power relationship also becomes more decentralized. Imagine one day, if every VR user can create his/her own nation, develop his/her own culture and even trade with other VR avatar with virtual currency, how will us manage the politics in VR world and the one in ground reality?
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