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VI7: Virtual Reality, Universal Life

Virtual Reality, Universal Life

Kel Smith, in Digital Outcasts, 2013

Abstract

This chapter discusses the use of virtual worlds for people with disabilities, exploring the ways that immersive environments are used for education, fellowship, companionship, and therapy. It investigates the interaction models of virtual reality, examining how the body and mind respond to controlling an avatar, and includes a case study where virtual reality is used as a form of pain distraction. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on how people with disabilities and illness find communities of practice within their virtual circles of peers.

Virtual Reality and the Self

Vivian Sobchack, media theorist and film critic, once wrote that “even the most ordinary images find their value, their substance, their impetus, in the agency and investments of our flesh.” She was speaking about the concept of decorporealization—that point in which a media object, such as a photograph, depicts a persona that is at once representative and interchangeable with our identity of the self.

This is a complicated way of saying that users of virtual worlds who associate more closely with their avatars tend to have a more rewarding experience. Something takes over in the mind, which begins to show activity typical of what the avatar is doing on the screen. Digital outcasts who participate in this space identify very personally with their in-world personas and take their virtual lives very seriously. We might consider this primarily an augmentationist approach, but we find this behavior spanning all users of virtual worlds.

Digital outcasts associate very personally with their virtual identities.

Researchers at Stanford University have found that the more closely an avatar resembles the actual person, the more likely it is to psychologically inhabit the virtual body and assume its characteristics. “The remarkable thing is how little a virtual human has to do to produce fairly large effects on behavior,” said Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. His team discovered that slightly tweaking visual characteristics of the avatar—adjusting the avatar’s appearance in weight or making the avatar “more” or “less” attractive—created social effects that seeped into real-life interactions. “What we learn in one body is shared with other bodies we inhabit, whether virtual or physical,” concluded the research team.

Virtual worlds have found a strong and enthusiastic audience among people who live with autism spectrum disorders. Predominant among this user group are those who experience mild to severe anxiety when interacting with other people—a textbook example of an immersionist. They may also have limited attention spans and difficulty controlling their emotions. The virtual world is thus used as a way to work on social skills and common etiquette practices in a relatively safe environment, where they feel they will be judged more fairly than in real life.

People who are on the spectrum are a fiercely protective group, and many of them find a sense of fellowship and community within their virtual networks. The folks they connect with every day become part of their extended digital family. There are some who believe that the relationships they form in virtual worlds are more meaningful than those in real life—they’ve overcomed their awkwardness and learned to translate their anxiety productively.

Researchers in Dallas are conducting brain-imaging and neurocognitive tests on people with autism before and after virtual therapy sessions. Subjects tend to show improvements in several areas, including social appropriateness and ability to read a person’s body language. One 35-year-old graduate student revealed that he felt more confident making small talk since practicing in virtual reality. “I’m usually not good with someone face to face,” he said. “I tend to feel awkward and put my foot in my mouth.”

The Center for BrainHealth in Dallas has picked up on this study and taken a truly futuristic approach in helping children with autism learn how to navigate social situations, from ordering something in a coffee shop to practicing for a job interview. An avatar on the screen shows facial expressions and gestures, helping the subject better understand emotional triggers. So far, the therapy is proving to be successful. “Four or five sessions in here is worth about 2 or 3 years of real world training,” says Clark Thurston, a 16 year old with Asperger’s syndrome. Thurston’s mother was astounded at how well the virtual reality therapy worked for her autistic son. “He got bullied a lot, so he carried around a lot of pain,” she said tearfully. “I never even dared to hope that [the treatment] would be this good.”

The face is the gateway to improving social interaction among people with autism spectrum disorders.

Why is this approach so successful for some people? Researcher Dan Krawczyk thinks it has to do with the bond between avatar and subject:

When you’re driving an avatar, you’re in virtual space, riding one of these characters as yourself. [But] it’s not just recognizing a face. It’s recognizing emotion. A lot of brain areas have to talk to each other and coordinate, and some of these connections are not as strong as they should be. The face is the gateway to social interaction.

What Dr. Krawczyk describes is a form of anthropomorphic realism, which is the degree to which an object or depiction is personified to represent a human form.

Operating an avatar onscreen triggers a neurological response that replicates the authenticity of a physical experience.

Studies further indicate that a kinetic response improves anthropomorphic realism, which might reveal insights into how people with limited mobility connect with their virtual selves. “A fundamental difference is you have an avatar,” says Mark Dubin. He is a professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado and designs haptic interfaces for virtual reality. He supports the notion that avatars can act as an extension for the mind and body by replicating the feel of authenticity to a physical experience, which triggers a neurological response:

You have a representative that is you and responds to you. You move, it moves. You feel like you’re there, literally. Your brain will show activity typical of what the avatar is actually doing.

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VI1: Technology Changes Rapidly; Humans Don’t

Technology Changes Rapidly; Humans Don't

Tharon W. Howard, in Design to Thrive, 2010

Abstract

The RIBS heuristic are essential to better understand how to design sustainable social networks and online communities. This final chapter is designed to afford network architects and community designers a better view both of RIBS and of external forces in the social media landscape. Social networks and online communities have the potential to effect economic, political, and social changes far beyond the expectations of their designers, and that kind of “success” can ironically threaten the sustainability of a community. When social media begin to impact larger institutions, such as the election of government officials, intellectual property laws, religious institutions, educational settings, and other established institutions of literate cultures, then a battle for control ensues. The issues resulting from such clashes can destroy communities whose leaders lack a means of understanding and anticipating the conflicts. This chapter explores four areas of the future that history suggests are likely to be the social networking battlefield of the future. These four areas are copyrights and intellectual property; disciplinary control vs. individual creativity; visual, technological, and new media literacies; and decision-making contexts for future markets. One can use RIBS as an analytical tool on existing communities in order to assess the health of their community's interactions.

Ownership and control of virtual identities

Control of an individual's virtual identity is yet another example of this future intellectual property battlefield. In this book, I've talked a lot about Blizzard's extraordinarily successful game, World of Warcraft (WoW). I've talked about how WoW players have an incredible investment in the avatars they create. Players spend months, years even, creating their avatars, collecting different weapons, armor, articles of clothing, and so on by playing the game. And, as shown in Chapter 6 with the character Justus, WoW players invest a lot of their real identities in the characters they create. For most of them, that avatar belongs to them; they made it and they invested significant resources in its creation. This is also true for users of the social network Second Life. They also identify with their avatars so strongly that users are living a “second life” through those avatars as well as the spaces they create. For WoW and Second Life users, their avatars are their virtual identities. So if these users want to share an image of their virtual selves with others, they should be able to do so, right?

Wrong. They can't share their virtual identities because (1) screen captures are considered “derivative works” and (2) because Blizzard owns World of Warcraft and Linden Labs owns Second Life. Blizzard had hundreds of artists, designers, and programmers create the armor, weapons, clothing, and mounts that players collect. As a result, they own the game and any derivative works that come from it. If a player wished, for example, to create a line of t-shirts and posters with her avatar on the front that she would sell through, say, Café Press, then Blizzard could sue for copyright infringement. And again, this makes sense from Blizzard's perspective, as the company provided all the artwork and software required to derive that particular avatar's configuration. But from the player's perspective, the avatar is her virtual self; it's who she is in that world. In the real world, she might wear Lee blue jeans to work every day; that doesn't mean she has to give Lee a cut of her salary or, to carry the analogy further, that Lee has the right to tell her she can't go to that particular job because she's wearing jeans they designed.

Ownership of purchasing identities

Beacon was an application that would tell other users on Facebook what products and services an individual was purchasing. The idea, presumably, was that knowing what videos your friends were renting, what movie tickets they were purchasing, and what video games they were buying would encourage you to make similar purchase decisions. However, the loss of control over the information being revealed about a user's Facebook identity infuriated large numbers of Facebook users who brought a class action lawsuit against Beacon, Blockbuster, Fandango, Overstock, Gamefly, Hotwire, and a small number of other companies who had partnered with Beacon to provide the service. In this case, the virtual identity wasn't an image or an avatar, it was the ability to control the story or picture of an individual that emerged through his or her purchasing decisions. The virtual identity in this case may be less tangible than an avatar, yet users’ need to own and control it is no less passionate.