Through the Screen Door: Virtual Reality Experiences

Public Defence of PhD Thesis by Dooley Murphy.

Assessment Committee

• Associate Professor Birger Langkjær, Chair (University of Copenhagen)
• Professor Kristine Jørgensen (Universitetet i Bergen)
• Professor Stefania Serafin (Aalborg University)

Moderator of the defence

• Associate Professor Jack Andersen (University of Copenhagen)

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

• At the Information Desk of the Copenhagen University Library, South Campus
• In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
• At the Department of Communication, Karen Blixens Plads 8

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) art and entertainment are flourishing. Between the extremes of ‘film-like’ and ‘game-like,’ VR lies the catch-all category ‘VR experiences’: A loose-knit grouping that spans all manner of narrative and non-narrative content.

Discussions of VR experiences typically privilege immersion and agency. It’s said that immersion is best induced by offering the participant opportunities to perform virtual actions (i.e., exercise virtual agency) and shape a story’s course. Looking to develop this line of thinking, the thesis first asks, ‘how are participants guided in VR experiences?’, and argues that while agency is indeed important, a neglected, corresponding phenomenon is agency’s opposite number: Patiency, or the embodied feeling of being acted upon.

Sensations of patiency in VR can be just as engrossing as exercises of agency. Consider vertigo, ‘butterflies’, startles, or the weird feeling of having your personal space invaded by lifelike virtual humans. The thesis employs formal, conceptual, and textual analyses in working towards an account of how patiency, like agency, can be used to guide and beguile VR participants. Part one, FORM, first addresses some design considerations (what is a VR experience? how do they ‘position’ the participant relative to the action? how do they convey narratives or otherwise represent events?) before turning towards VR experiences’ psychological functions.

Part two, FUNCTION, extrudes cross-disciplinary definitions of presence and immersion, suggesting that the latter, attention, emotion, agency, and patiency are all deeply entangled. Immersion, construed as a fragile state of enthrallment, is argued as easily engendered in VR by leveraging self-reflexive concerns at the nexus of attention and emotion. That is, by eliciting feelings of patiency.

The thesis concludes that VR participants are most amenable to designers’ attempts at guidance when ‘hot’, affect-laden cognition leads them to engage with aspects of a virtual environment pre-reflectively. Patiency—both a design strategy and a force or a dynamic akin to agency—is thus framed as an indispensable way of sustaining immersion and guiding the VR participant that far surpasses ‘mere’ spectacle.