In week 2 we talked about various topics, including the 3 components of VR, which are immersion, presence and interactivity. We talked about various pioneers of VR and one of the people that were mentioned was Mel Slater who worked specifically under VR presence. After being told to do research one a topic talked about in the last 2 weeks as assigned to us by David, I chose to explore the ideals of Mel Slater.
His fascination to find out what makes virtual reality unique as compared to other communication mediums intrigued me. He talks about how VR activates a human’s sensorimotor contingencies in a way which fools our brain and makes us believe that we are being transported into another world and that whatever happens there is real. He broke this entire experience into the Place Illusion and the Plausible Illusion where the place illusion answers the question, ”Am I there?” and the latter answers, ”is this happening?” After reading several articles, many of them seemed to be comparing Slater’s theory with the elemental theory of presence which describes different qualities of embodied presence, social and mental presence, emotional presence and active presence. In an interview article in which is he questioned about the same, Slater says that all the mentioned qualities of experience are not unique to virtual reality. He explains that It is possible to be as emotionally engaged with a book or movie as you can be to a VR experience and therefore this particular theory of the conceptualisation of presence isn’t important to determine whats makes a VR experience unique.
This entire exercise to research a topic was a step closer to figuring out our final topic of research that we will work on,