Emotion keeps the make-believe real
The use of powerful graphics to create a realistic virtual environment only matters if the aim is to trigger a sense of threat
THE graphics might be great – in fact they might blow you away – but if there's no emotional connection to what we see in a virtual world, then it simply won't feel real.
A new study has found that a strong emotional response to virtual reality (VR) worlds is crucial to becoming fully immersed in the artifice. Indeed, the 'feels' are actually more important than the visuals for making the experience believable at all.
Unlike so much cyberpunk scifi, where we plug our sensorium direct to the digital realm, real-world VR is delivered via cutting edge headsets that cover our visual field, and pipe sound into our ears.
The visual experience is provided by powerful graphics, rendering images into 3D, much like they would on a monitor screen, but without the distance that reminds us we're viewing a make-believe world on a screen. The headset serves the illusion of being right there in the midst of the virtual realm.
But, as the study has found, if what we're seeing doesn't provoke an emotional response – happy or scared, say – then the vista remains little more than a carefully computed illusion. And stubbornly analogue cortex knows it at a visceral level.
“A lot of money goes into making headsets and screens better, and into rendering virtual worlds more realistic, but more effort needs to be centred on improving the user’s emotional experience,” said Dr Crescent Jicol, from the University of Bath; the study's principal investigator.
Now there's surely a name for a cyberpunk techno-thriller, but let's not get ourselves sidetracked; keep our minds on the study. All of this isn't just about gaming and other fictions. A brain-deep sense of realism has plenty of other more everyday-life applications, too.
In the years to come, according to the study team, VR is expected to play an ever-growing role in many areas of life, from workplace training to medical rehabilitation programmes.
Human factor
The study was carried out by academics in Bath's Department of Computer Science, along with experts from the university's Department of Psychology. Between them, they conducted what is said to be the first study to examine how 'technical factors' interact with 'human factors'.
Put another way, the team wanted to explore how visual realism and field of view is affected by feelings such as fear or happiness, and a sense of the user's agency, when created a sense of 'presence' in a simulated environment.
Field of view describes the amount of the virtual world you can see around you at any one moment, while agency refers to the impression you have that you can influence the virtual world by interacting with it. Presence, meanwhile, is the most studied and important variable in immersive VR and describes the visceral feeling of being in a simulated world.
“We used a large sample size – 360 participants – and found that, counter to previous assumptions, technical factors do not affect presence directly to any meaningful degree,” said Jicol. “But when technical factors are paired with human factors – for instance, a virtual environment’s ability to induce fear and agency – presence is impacted. In other words, ‘being there’ needs to be complemented with ‘doing there’ for maximum impact.”
Play the game
Those taking part in the study played a series of interactive games, and then completed questionnaires to assess their sense of presence, their felt emotions, and their agency in the VR world.
The games’ human factors (emotion and agency), and technical factors (visual realism and field of view), were manipulated using an experimental design, the study team explain. This resulted in all participants interacting with all 16 possible combinations of environments.
For instance, one game adopted a wide field of view and induced fear, while another adopted poor visual realism but induced happiness.
By doing so, this is said to have allowed the researchers to systematically explore the relative important of the four factors – and their interactions with one another – on users' sense of presence.
“The main takeaway is that emotion and agency are crucial to inducing presence, but visual realism is not,” Jicol said.
More specifically, the researchers found that VR environments with the most to gain from being graphically realistic were those that induced fear. This became apparent when participants were asked to play a game that involved the protagonist defending themselves against a threatening wolf-like creature by shining a torch in its face.
“Why did the environment benefit from looking more visually realistic? Maybe because people were scrutinising it more, looking for a way out,” Jicol said.
In a similar game designed to induce happiness, the wolf was replaced by a playful dog, and a laser was provided to control the animal’s movement and actions.
“People felt present without needing to scan the environment and find a way out, which is almost certainly why field of view had absolutely no impact on their sense of presence in that world,” Jicol added.
The study’s authors says they hope this research will be followed by further explorations into factors that contribute to an improved user experience of VR.
They suspect a user’s personality traits may also be important to their sense of presence in a virtual world. Going further, as the technology develops, they anticipate that the software of tomorrow will be configurable to increase or decrease the emotional and technical content of any given program.
Realism, it seems, is what we make it; or should that be feel?
MC