游戏虚拟空间在建筑学中的研究现状

在室内设计方面，虚拟现实技术(Virtual Reality，简称VR)是一种出现于20世纪80年代末的计算机领域的最新技术，它以模拟的方式为需求者创造一个反映观察对象变化并与使用者互动的三维世界。随着CDIO工程教育理念以及室内设计教学技术的发展，它可为学生提供生动、逼真的学习环境，使学生成为虚拟学习环境的一名参与者，这对调动学生的学习积极性以及施工图虚拟场景仿真化教学都将起到积极的作用。

数字化传播时代，受到青少年群体青睐的网络游戏已经成为一种新的文化传播方式，各行业都在积极寻求与游戏IP的融合合作。在游戏IP与文旅的跨界融合中，头部网络游戏《原神》表现突出，不仅将现实空间的文旅元素融入到开放的虚拟游戏世界里，线下旅游景区景点也响应线上活动，将游戏IP移植到线下空间，通过打造富有体验性的互动形式，推动游戏玩家向景点游客进行身份转换。本研究旨在通过列斐伏尔空间生产中的三元空间辩证法中探究游戏IP在赋能文旅发展过程中的多重实践，为各地文旅提供融合发展的新思路，在一定程度上也能为网络游戏的IP转化提供新路径。

本研究旨在深入探讨人工智能辅助绘画技术在空间设计创新中的应用，特别是其在现实空间和虚拟空间创作中的影响。研究采用了综合的方法论，包括文献回顾、实验分析和案例研究，以全面评估AI技术在空间设计领域的应用及其潜力。在现实空间设计中，该技术能够为设计师提供丰富的视觉灵感和创意激发，而在虚拟空间设计中，则能够快速构建富有想象力的环境，促进创新的设计思路。研究结果表明，人工智能辅助绘画技术在激发创意思维、提升设计效率、增强视觉表达力和促进跨学科融合方面具有显著优势。局限性和挑战包括技术的局限性、文化敏感性的不足、对设计师创造力的影响、知识产权等。

本文探讨了场景理论视角下，数字游戏《黑神话：悟空》如何通过精心设计的场景实现传统文化的创新传播。论文分析了游戏场景中的空间布局、自然景观、传统艺术形式、场景与角色互动的运用等文化元素，并阐述了这些元素如何增强玩家的文化体验。同时，论文总结了《黑神话：悟空》对数字游戏产业在文化融合与创新、技术手段应用、产业发展与文化传播协同方面的启示。

在真实的情境中教学可以促进学生的理解，对于初中生来说，他们需要一些具体形象的支撑，3D体验游戏可以将抽象的事物具体化，让学生感受到真实的世界。本文以Conceptual Play Spaces理论为基础，根据初中生的学习特征，设计教育游戏桃花源记，激发学习者的学习兴趣，使学生沉浸在教育游戏情境中，提高学习者核心素养。

本文围绕VR购物环境中的视觉感知机制，提出一种基于分形维度的评价方法，用于量化场景的视觉复杂度以及和用户场景感知之间的关系，为VR购物环境的设计提供了新的指导方向和操作建议。研究从场景空间布局、商品排列逻辑、背景纹理特征等几方面出发，将虚拟购物场景的视觉感知与分形维度进行关联并建立评价模型。研究发现范围在1.3至1.5的分形维度能有效提升用户对VR购物场景的空间识别效率和情绪舒适度。过高或过低的分形维度会分别导致视觉负荷过载与不足，进而影响决策效率与购买行为。并针对视觉对环境感知的优势和不足，提出主客观评价模型、多因素加权评价模型以及多维度感知评价模型，为提升VR购物体验质量开辟了新的方法路径。

网络游戏行业迅速崛起的同时，游戏相关的著作权问题也随之增加，其中有关游戏地图的侵权纠纷也在司法实践中逐渐增加，其核心问题在于游戏地图作品属性的认定。在FPS游戏中，游戏地图具有不可否认的重要意义，从其制作过程和本质功能出发能够为判定其作品属性提供有益思路。场景地图发挥指示玩家位置的实用性功能和呈现美术效果的艺术性功能，具备图形作品和美术作品的双重属性，而平面缩略图在满足独创性要求的前提下能够构成图形作品。

随着社会科技的发展，建筑设计媒介也在不断变化与改变，从早期的“一维”语言文字到“二维”建筑图形，再到“三维”建筑模型。虚拟现实(VR)技术作为一种新的建筑视觉再现的数字化媒介，给人们对建筑设计过程的认识带来了巨大的影响，其对建筑材料、材质、肌理、光线变化与空间的真实模拟可以为设计师带来更直观的感受。虚拟现实不仅为建筑设计课程教学的发展提供了新的机会，而且也提供了比传统教学方法更有效的教学方法。将虚拟现实技术与博物馆建筑设计教学相结合，能够更好地提升学生设计素养，弥补传统设计类课程的缺陷。

经由探讨生物皮层在调节温度的机制，本研究目的在建构一个具有互动性的建筑皮层雏形，此雏形可以自主性且动态性地调适环境温度的变化，提供建筑教育跨域实践新的可能方向。研究方法包括了解生物的皮层构造，以及调适温度的动作，并予以归类并转化。最后，架构在之前建立的“仿生游戏场”平台，以淡江建筑系设计工作室的七位大四学生为实验对象，并结合实体运算和数字制造，进行不同生物在调节温度之皮层运动与其构造变化的观察、谱记、模拟、运算、聚集等设计操作。该研究提供新的建筑设计学习返乡，其内容包括：由上而下的设计思考、跨领域的设计学习，以及运算化的设计整合，这些内容将提供未来调试性建筑智慧化的参考。

文章以数字游戏《爱丽丝疯狂回归》的哥特风格场景设计和的《银河历险记1~3》超现实主义艺术风格的游戏场景设计两个作品为例，分析了数字游戏场景设计的风格化趋向。风格化游戏场景造型设计，传达出来的是一种超前的设计思维方式，为游戏设计提供了无限的创造潜能和审美视野，使游戏场景设计呈现出富有个性色彩和文化积淀的美学理念。

三维游戏作为新兴媒介，受到众多年轻群体的追捧，其融合了视觉、听觉等多种互动元素，具有独特的内容表现和情感表达能力，在当今艺术设计领域发挥着重要作用。本研究基于符号学理论，借由对《双人成行》游戏设计中的角色造型、场景布置及互动方式进行逐一审视，从符号表现和叙事内涵的视角揭示游戏体验过程中用户对身份转化、意义模仿，以及脉络演进的内涵。本研究从多重维度探讨了符号学在三维游戏中的作用，剖析符号学对用户情感共鸣所产生的影响，旨在为未来的游戏创作提供新方向。

新技术催生新生态，近年来，元宇宙技术得到了人们广泛关注。尝试将元宇宙赋能钦州老街创新发展能够成为当下钦州文旅产业数字化发展的重要路径。文章以钦州老街现状为切入点，探讨了钦州老街创新发展的必要性与重要性，并提出了利用元宇宙技术构建虚拟化场景与现实场景的碰撞融合，打造现实虚拟世界，推动钦州老街在原有文化产业的基础上焕发出新光彩，为元宇宙虚拟现实实践运用和钦州老街适应时代发展提供新的参考方向。

实验教学是创新人才培养的重要途径，然而目前高校实验教学受到实验仪器短缺、实验周期过长、试错机会缺乏等弊端，限制了大学生实验试错的机会和思考问题、解决问题的能力。为解决传统实验教学中存在的问题，将虚拟现实(Virtual Reality, VR)技术与工程实验课程相结合，构建了虚拟实验系统，探索了基于VR技术的实验教学在创新人才培养上的优越性。以土木工程中的三轴实验为例，提出了基于三轴VR实验系统的“以学为本”、“虚实结合”的创新人才培养实验教学模式，革新了实验教学课堂、提升了学生的兴趣，为改善传统实验教学的缺陷提供了新的解决方案。

<JATS1:p>Video games are among the most popular media on the planet, and billions of people inhabit these virtual worlds on a daily basis. This book investigates the architecture of video games, the buildings, roads and cities in which gamers play out their roles. Examining both the aesthetic aspects and symbolic roles of video game architecture as they relate to gameplay, Gabriele Aroni tackles a number of questions, including:</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>- How digital architecture relates to real architecture</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>- Where the inspiration for digital gaming architecture comes from, and how it moves into new directions</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>- How the design of virtual architecture influences gameplay and storytelling.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Looking at how architecture in video games communicates and interacts with players, this book combines semiotics and architecture theory to display how architecture is used in a variety of situations, with different aims and results. Using case studies from NaissanceE, Assassin’s Creed II and Final Fantasy XV, The Semiotics of Architecture in Video Games discusses the techniques used to create successful virtual spaces and proposes a framework to analyse video game architecture, ultimately explaining how to employ architectural solutions in video games in a systematic and effective way.</JATS1:p>

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The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. Navigable 3D spaces allow us to crawl, jump, fly, or even teleport through fictional worlds that come to life in our imagination. We encounter these spaces through a combination of perception and interaction. Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the player is interpreting them in order to engage with them. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of gameworlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality. Nitsche introduces five analytical layersrule-based space, mediated space, fictional space, play space, and social spaceand uses them in the analyses of games that range from early classics to recent titles. He revisits current topics in game research, including narrative, rules, and play, from this new perspective. Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers, and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose.

An exploration of how we see, use, and make sense of modern video game worlds. The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. Navigable 3D spaces allow us to crawl, jump, fly, or even teleport through fictional worlds that come to life in our imagination. We encounter these spaces through a combination of perception and interaction. Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the player is interpreting them in order to engage with them. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of gameworlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality. Nitsche introduces five analytical layers—rule-based space, mediated space, fictional space, play space, and social space—and uses them in the analyses of games that range from early classics to recent titles. He revisits current topics in game research, including narrative, rules, and play, from this new perspective. Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers, and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose.

This article centers on showing the results of the evaluation of an educational proposal focused on combining the BIM (Building Information Modeling) methodology, with video game rendering engines such as Unreal in the scope of a second course subject of the degree in Architecture. The educational proposal is based on the PBL methodology (Project Based on Learning), based on an occupation proposal for the "Pati de les Dones" (Women's Patio), belonging to the CCCB (Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) for integration into the GamePlay exhibition. The Game4City project, in which the experience is framed, has an exhibition section where visitors can interact, play, and propose occupations based on the programmed interactive system. The innovation of the proposal has two clear components: opening the door to students to professional systems that allow interactions to be defined in 3D virtual environments as an alternative to classic space compression systems, such as models, and the understanding of informal feedback from end-users on the most attractive proposals, something that allows students to better understand the needs of users and take them into account in the design of their future projects, improving their transversal skills. The results obtained support the proposal, although they identify a need for more practice time with the system and the problem of equipment that the confinement of the 2020 pandemic has caused.

PM) (stating that the video game industry made $22 billion in revenue in 2008 including a 22.9% increase in software sales over the previous year).2

From the Publisher: The first book to address the true history of computer-based multimedia. Web sites, CD-ROMs, video games, interactive television, virtual reality, touch-screen kiosks, 3D architecture design programs . . . these and other forms of computer-based multimedia will be as important to the twenty-first century as film and television were to the twentieth. But what is multimedia, where did it come from, and how does it work? Multimedia presents the fascinating dialogue between the arts and sciences over the last half-century that made today's multimedia possible. Scientists like Vannevar Bush, Douglas Englebart, Norbert Wiener; artists like John Cage, Nam June Paik, and William Gibson--their groundbreaking visions are brought together here for the first time, given historical context, and embedded in a clear explanation of the core concepts behind multimedia. Multimedia will be required reading for anyone who has built a Web site, studied computer graphics, or wondered at the rapid birth and evolution of the new media now changing every aspect of our lives. Introduction by William Gibson.

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First person exploration of architectural models using video game technology holds a great deal of promise for the field of architecture. It gives architects and clients an immediate sense of a building that may not have been conveyed by traditional architectural drawings. A video game allows criticism of a building to be based on moving through a 3D space instead of analyzing 2D diagrams. However, to best make use of this technology we must understand how people‟s perceptions differ between the real and virtual versions of a space. The main objective of this research is to test how perception differs between a real building and a virtual walkthrough of the building in a video game engine. Participants in the experiment were asked a series of identical questions in a virtual and real version of the same building and the results were compared. It was found that in the virtual environment people tended to underestimate and to perceive distance less accurately than in real space. Findings show this underestimation of distance may not only be a product of limited field of view, as has been concluded in previous research, but may also effected by camera height and graphical quality of the walkthrough. If this technology can be used during the architectural design process it has the potential to fundamentally change the way we create, contemplate and critique architecture.

Abstract Background Presenting significant building or engineering 3D-models is a crucial part of the planning, construction and maintenance phases in terms of collaboration and understanding. Especially in complex or large-scale models, immersion is one of the major key factors for being able to intuitively perceive all aspects of the scene. A fully immersive system needs to give the user a large field-of-view with reduced latency for lifelike impression. Technologies such as VRwalls and shutter glasses can deliver high refresh rates, yet fail to give a large field-of-view. Head-mounted-devices for virtual reality fill this gap. Head tracking mechanisms translate movements of the user’s head into virtual camera movements and enable a natural way of examining models. Unlike a stereoscopic representation with projectors, point-of-view tracking can be achieved separately for each individual user. Hardware costs for such systems were very high in the past, but have dropped due to virtual reality systems now gaining traction in the mainstream gaming community. Methods In this paper we present a way to build a low-cost, highly immersive virtual reality environment for engineering and construction applications. Furthermore, we present a method to simplify and partly automate the process of reusing digital building models, which are already used in construction, to create virtual scenes, instead of having to do parallel content creation for visualization. Using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display and the Leap Motion hand-tracking device, we show the possibilities of naturally interacting within a virtual space in different use cases. The software, based on the popular game engine Unreal Engine 4, will be used as a basis for further research and development. Results Building Information Modeling data can be imported to UE4 with our presented plugin. Using an automated database for mapping materials to the geometry simplifies the process of importing Building Information Modeling entities. The refresh rate of the system stays within acceptable margins needed for virtual reality applications using head-mounted devices. Conclusions Head-mounted devices present a great potential for the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry, as a person can experience realistic first-person situations without having to care about injuries. Automated processes for the simplification of content creation, leveraging existing models, and the usage of visual programming languages enable even nonprogrammers to create scenarios to their needs.

Real walking offers higher immersive presence for virtual reality (VR) applications than alternative locomotive means such as walking-in-place and external control gadgets, but needs to take into consideration different room sizes, wall shapes, and surrounding objects in the virtual and real worlds. Despite perceptual study of impossible spaces and redirected walking, there are no general methods to match a given pair of virtual and real scenes. We propose a system to match a given pair of virtual and physical worlds for immersive VR navigation. We first compute a planar map between the virtual and physical floor plans that minimizes angular and distal distortions while conforming to the virtual environment goals and physical environment constraints. Our key idea is to design maps that are globally surjective to allow proper folding of large virtual scenes into smaller real scenes but locally injective to avoid locomotion ambiguity and intersecting virtual objects. From these maps we derive altered rendering to guide user navigation within the physical environment while retaining visual fidelity to the virtual environment. Our key idea is to properly warp the virtual world appearance into real world geometry with sufficient quality and performance. We evaluate our method through a formative user study, and demonstrate applications in gaming, architecture walkthrough, and medical imaging.

Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Mapping Cyberspace Issues to consider when viewing images Structure of the book Final words Chapter 2: Mapping Infrastructure and Traffic Historical maps of telecommunications Maps from the birth of the Net Mapping where the wires, fibre-optic cables and satellites really are Infrastructure census maps Domain name maps Marketing maps of Internet service providers Interactive mapping of networks Visualising network topologies in abstract space The geography of data flows Mapping traceroutes What's the Net 'weather' like today? Mapping cyberspace usage in temporal space Chapter 3: Mapping the Web Information spaces of the Internet The beginning of the Web Mapping individual websites Mapping tools to manage websites Mapping website evolution Mapping paths and traffic through a website 'The view from above': 2D visualisation and navigation of the Web 'The view from within': 3D visualisation and navigation of the Web Chapter 4: Mapping Conversation and Community Mapping email Mapping mailing lists and bulletin boards Mapping Usenet Mapping chat Mapping MUDs Mapping virtual worlds Mapping game space Chapter 5: Imagining Cyberspace Science fiction visions of cyberspace Cinematic visions of cyberspace Artistic imaginings: subversive surfing and warping the Web Imagining the architecture of cyberspace Chapter 6: Final Thoughts Further Reading Index

Preface Part 1 Introduction to Augmented and Virtual Reality Chapter 1 Computer Generated Worlds Chapter 2 Understanding Space Part 2 Understanding the Human Senses and Their Relationship to Output / Input Devices Chapter 3 The Mechanics of Sight Chapter 4 Component Technologies of Head-Mounted Displays Chapter 5 Google Glass and Related Augmenting Displays Chapter 6 Fully Immersive Displays Chapter 7 The Mechanics of Hearing Chapter 8 Audio Displays Chapter 9 The Mechanics of Feeling Chapter 10 Tactile and Force Feedback Devices Chapter 11 Sensors for Tracking Position, Orientation and Motion Chapter 12 Devices to Enable Interaction with Data Part 3 Applications of Augmented and Virtual Reality Chapter 13 Gaming and Chapter 14 Architecture and Chapter 15 Science and Engineering Chapter 16 Health and Medicine Chapter 17 Aerospace and Chapter 18 Education Chapter 19 Information Control Chapter 20 Telerobotics and Teleprescence Part 4 Human Factors, Legal and Social Considerations Chapter 21 Human Factors Considerations Chapter 22 Legal and Social Chapter 23 The Future Appendix A Bibliography Appendix B Resources

Abstract In his Fun Palace project, Price turned not to traditional architecture or fantasy but to the discourses and theories of his own time, such as the emerging sciences of cybernetics, information technology, and game theory, as well as Situationism and theater, to develop a radically new concept of improvisational architecture capable of negotiating the uncertain social terrain of postwar Britain. As socially interactive architecture, the Fun Palace integrated concepts of technological interchangeability with social participation and improvisation as innovative and egalitarian alternatives to traditional free time and education, giving back to the working classes a sense of agency and creativity. The three-dimensional structure of the Fun Palace was the operative space-time matrix of a virtual architecture. The variable “program” and form of the Fun Palace were not conventional architecture but much closer to what we understand today as the computer program: an array of algorithmic functions and logical gateways that control temporal events and processes in a virtual device.

Purpose: This paper investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) technologies—specifically, building information modeling (BIM) (“Autodesk Revit”) and game engines (“Unreal Engine”)—to enhance public involvement in the design and execution of architecture and urban projects. The main research question focuses on comparing the effectiveness of these two methods in creating an interactive design model for participatory design in public spaces. Methods: The study employed a VR exploratory experiment with 33 participants, followed by semi-structured interviews to analyze two recent developments in London: the Sky Garden, and Crossrail Place Roof Garden. Participants interacted with the design models and provided feedback on their experiences. Results: The findings demonstrate that integrating VR with BIM software using the Enscape plugin effectively enhances user involvement, enabling real-time generation and testing of design alternatives. While both methods were found to be beneficial, participants reported a preference for the direct implementation of VR in BIM software. Conclusions: This research highlights the potential of VR technologies—specifically, BIM and game engines—as a co-design approach for public and social spaces in urban environments. It also identifies limitations and future research opportunities in adopting these methods for participatory design.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the investigation on contemporary applications of game design in architectural visualization, urban environmental planning and the results to address the problems of traditional methods specifically in terms of interactivity and visualization. The authors present the prototype that incorporates information modeling and virtual reality (VR) into interactive architectural visualization. Design/methodology/approach The proposed system supports a virtual walkthrough process that allows users to navigate in an architectural space of their imagination and design. The immersion in the design of living space or environment has been made possible through the inclusion of VR through the use of WebVR technology to deploy the design to be experienced. Findings This study investigates and establishes a framework that explores the intricacies of 3 imensional (3D) Architectural Visualization in a real-time engine by designing a visual experience with a better level of user interaction and then deploying it through VR. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few experimental frameworks which perfectly integrates VR for visualization in digital home design environments. The prospective applications of this framework are in several fields of construction innovation, architectural design, 3D modeling, virtual and augmented reality.

A visually immersive display can make an educational game more effective, if concepts are embodied in an information-rich space and the interaction/perception design exploits the egocentric view that the display affords. For example, ancient Egyptian temples juxtapose language and symbol in an architecture meant to be understood from the inside. In this study, students, ages 11 through 14, played an educational game based on a virtual temple. In an unstructured test in which students produced their own guided tours of the temple, those who played the game in a digital dome showed better factual recall (P &lt; 0.05) than those who used a standard desktop.

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Immersive VR, a technology getting attention in recent years, is widely applied to the realm of serious games because it can provide users with both fun and intriguing experiences. This poster proposes a self-training VR serious game for fire evacuation drill with concurrent tele-collaboration among avatars controlled by and synchronized with multiple-users in remote places. We introduce a system architecture of both single user and its extension to multiple-user system. The single user system consists of wearable sensors and 3D VR HMD to synchronize a user's motions to one's own avatar in the virtual environment. We can easily extend the system to the multi-user mode through the Unity game cloud server. The multi-user mode enable players to experience a tele-existence so that they can collaborate in the virtual environment, and they can concurrently navigate while interacting with virtual objects as if they coexist in the same space.

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An experiment was conducted to compare and explore the relationship between the way people perceive real and virtual spaces. Twenty-four architects toured either a real museum gallery or a realtime computer generated model of the same gallery under one of three increasingly inclusive viewing conditions, i.e., looking at a monitor, viewing through stereoscopic head-mounted displays without and with head-position tracking. Subjects were asked to perform spatial dimension, orientation and evaluation tasks. The most significant results indicate that subjects consistently underestimate the dimensions of the gallery in all three computer simulation conditions when compared to touring the real gallery. The most inclusive viewing condition yields underestimates for spatial dimensions which are significantly greater than the other two simulation conditions.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Ensuring veridical spatial perception in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is an important yet elusive goal. In this paper, we present the results of two experiments that seek further insight into this problem. In the first of these experiments, initially reported in Interrante, Ries, Lindquist, and Anderson (2007), we seek to disambiguate two alternative hypotheses that could explain our recent finding (Interrante, Anderson, and Ries, 2006a) that participants appear not to significantly underestimate egocentric distances in HMD-based IVEs, relative to in the real world, in the special case that they unambiguously know, through first-hand observation, that the presented virtual environment is a high-fidelity 3D model of their concurrently occupied real environment. Specifically, we seek to determine whether people are able to make similarly veridical judgments of egocentric distances in these matched real and virtual environments because (1) they are able to use metric information gleaned from their exposure to the real environment to calibrate their judgments of sizes and distances in the matched virtual environment, or because (2) their prior exposure to the real environment enabled them to achieve a heightened sense of presence in the matched virtual environment, which leads them to act on the visual stimulus provided through the HMD as if they were interpreting it as a computer-mediated view of an actual real environment, rather than just as a computer-generated picture, with all of the uncertainties that that would imply. In our second experiment, we seek to investigate the extent to which augmenting a virtual environment model with faithfully-modeled replicas of familiar objects might enhance people's ability to make accurate judgments of egocentric distances in that environment.

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Previous work has shown that giving a user a first-person virtual avatar can increase the accuracy of their egocentric distance judgments in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). This result provides one of the rare examples of a manipulation that can enable improved spatial task performance in a virtual environment without potentially compromising the ability for accurate information transfer to the real world. However, many open questions about the scope and limitations of the effectiveness of IVE avatar self-embodiment remain. In this paper, we report the results of a series of four experiments, involving a total of 40 participants, that explore the importance, to the desired outcome of enabling enhanced spatial perception accuracy, of providing a high level of geometric and motion fidelity in the avatar representation. In these studies, we assess participants' abilities to estimate egocentric distances in a novel virtual environment under four different conditions of avatar self-embodiment: a) no avatar; b) a fully tracked, custom-fitted, high fidelity avatar, represented using a textured triangle mesh; c) the same avatar as in b) but implemented with single point rather than full body tracking; and d) a fully tracked but simplified avatar, represented by a collection of small spheres at the raw tracking marker locations. The goal of these investigations is to attain insight into what specific characteristics of a virtual avatar representation are most important to facilitating accurate spatial perception, and what cost-saving measures in the avatar implementation might be possible. Our results indicate that each of the simplified avatar implementations we tested is significantly less effective than the full avatar in facilitating accurate distance estimation; in fact, the participants who were given the simplified avatar representations performed only marginally (but not significantly) more accurately than the participants who were given no avatar at all. These findings suggest that the beneficial impact of providing users with a high fidelity avatar self-representation may stem less directly from the low-level size and motion cues that the avatar embodiment makes available to them than from the cognitive sense of presence that the self-embodiment supports.

The recent developments in Information Technology (IT) and digital media have introduced new opportunities to design studio and new dimensions to design and architecture. The current research studies how the immersion of Virtual Reality (VR) in architectural design studio affects spatial perception through the design process. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of using such environments on changing the way how to design for human experience: how it will improve students' spatial understanding of Three Dimensions (3D) volumes, and how it will enhance their imagination, enrich their creativity and promote their ability to experience their design's sensations. This study hypothesizes that using an immersive virtual environment in design studio will empower students' imaginations and give them the ability to understand and experience their ideas. It will give them the opportunity to check their design's validity with greater 3D exploration, understanding and comprehension of spatial volumes. Within a framework of an experimental design research, a series of experiments was conducted to evaluate what had been assumed. The research used teaching, monitoring, explanatory observation and evaluation methods. The results showed that VR can not only enhance spatial perception and improve the design, but also it can affect the design process and make changes in the architectural design way of thinking. It can help designers to incorporate human experience within the design process.

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Design understanding and needed level of the accompanying spatial skills that enable it depend on information input provided by a visual representation of a design solution. During product development, designers use models to visually represent a design solution. These visual representations can be mediated by various technologies (for example, an immersive virtual reality (IVR) technology or 2D user interfaces such as a monitor display), providing designers with different types of information. Capabilities of an IVR technology such as stereopsis, eye-height reference, spatial updating, and multimodal interaction, have shown a potential to mitigate the cognitive load and the need for highly developed spatial skills enabling design understanding. Nevertheless, specific design understanding aspects for which IVR technology may be beneficial over conventional 2D user interfaces are yet to be clarified. The conducted experiment aimed to explore differences in designers' spatial perception of spatial properties and relations (affordances) of a design solution in virtual environments (VEs). The design solution was presented by a 3D CAD model in immersive virtual environment (IVE) and non-immersive virtual environment (nIVE). IVE was mediated using the IVR technology (head-mounted display; HMD), while nIVE using the conventional 2D user interface (a monitor display, a mouse, and a keyboard). Results indicate that engineering students more accurately perceive spatial properties in the IVE than nIVE. Besides, it is suggested that the likelihood of making the correct judgment of the affordance is similar in both VEs.

This study investigated perceptual and cognitive issues relating to manipulations of geometric field of view (GFOV) in three-dimensional perspective displays and the effects of incorporating virtual environment enhancements in the interface based on visual momentum (VM) techniques. Sixty participants, who were pretested for spatial ability, were required to navigate through a virtual office building while estimating space dimensions and performing spatial orientation tasks. A 3 − 2 − 2 mixed-subjects design compared three levels of GFOV, two levels of VM, and two levels of Difficulty. This study effectively demonstrates that the spatial characteristics of architectural representations in perspective displays are not always accurately perceived. Furthermore, the results indicate that manipulations in GFOV can produce perceptual and cognitive errors for the basic space dimensions in perspective displays; however, VM can be used to compensate for many of the biases shown to occur.

Human cognitive processes in wayfinding may differ depending on the time taken to accept visual information in environments. This study investigated users’ wayfinding processes using eye-tracking experiments, simulating a complex cultural space to analyze human visual movements in the perception and the cognitive processes through visual perception responses. The experiment set-up consisted of several paths in COEX Mall, Seoul—from the entrance of the shopping mall Starfield to the Star Hall Library to the COEX Exhibition Hall—using visual stimuli created by virtual reality (four stimuli and a total of 60 seconds stimulation time). The participants in the environment were 24 undergraduate or graduate students, with an average age of 24.8 years. Participants’ visual perception processes were analyzed in terms of the clarity and the recognition of spatial information and the activation of gaze fixation on spatial information. That is, the analysis of the visual perception process was performed by extracting “conscious gaze perspective” data comprising more than 50 consecutive 200 ms continuous gaze fixations; “visual understanding perspective” data were also extracted for more than 300 ms of continuous gaze fixation. The results show that the methods for analyzing the gaze data may vary in terms of processing, analysis, and scope of the data depending on the purpose of the virtual reality experiments. Further, they demonstrate the importance of what purpose statements are given to the subject during the experiment and the possibility of a technical approach being used for the interpretation of spatial information.

Real walking in large virtual indoor environments within a limited real world workspace requires effective spatial compression methods. These methods should be unnoticed by the user. Scene manipulation that creates overlapping spaces has been suggested in recent work. However, there is little research focusing on users' perception of over-lapping spaces depending on the layout of the environment. In this paper we investigate how the complexity of the path influences the perception of the overlapping spaces it connects. We compare three spatial virtual layouts with paths that differ in complexity (length and number of turns). Our results suggest that an increase of the path's length is less efficient in decreasing overlap detection than a combination of length and additional turns. Furthermore, combination of paths that differ in complexity influences the distance perception within overlapping spaces.

The influence of the sense of presence on spatial perception in a multi-sided back projection virtual reality system was investigated. Such an influence could diminish the reliability of spatial judgements in virtual environments (VEs), users' presence being only in part controllable. The VE used was a virtual passenger car cockpit. It provided a variety of distance, depth, and size cues. The sense of presence was manipulated by varying a number of technological, content-related, and other contributing factors in four experimental settings. Presence was measured with a questionnaire based on a three-dimensional presence concept (Schubert et al., 1999a). In these four VE settings, seventy-seven participants adjusted the size of the virtual cockpit to the memorized size of a real one. As the main result of the study, regression analyses yielded significant correlations of all three presence dimensions with distance/size estimations. A cognitive mechanism explaining the observed correlations is proposed. An analysis of this mechanism can help enhancing the reliability of spatial judgements in VEs. Effects of the setting variation on mean presence values were notable but weak. Apparently, the systematic influence of the contributing factors on presence was dominated by participants' individual reactions. Finally, systematic variations of mean size judgements across the four settings were found. Those are attributed to direct effects of two contributing factors (frame rate and surface brightness).

User spatial perception in different virtual environments may vary based on specific user characteristics and the features of the Virtual Reality (VR) system. This research explored the impacts of user characteristics such as age, gender, and design knowledge on spatial decision-making by comparing an Immersive Virtual Reality Interactive Environment (IVRIE) with a traditional Virtual Reality system (also known as desktop-based Virtual Reality system, abbreviated herein as the DT system). Users’ spatial perceptions when using IVRIE and a DT system were studied with regard to the features of the different systems, including the types of immersion and interaction, users’ perceptions of human body scale, and how the environments were explored. The factors affecting the two systems included texture variation, type of enclosure, and spatial function. Inferential testing using quantitative data was applied to identify differences between the two systems in terms of participants’ actual design outcomes. The results showed that based on the type, spatial characteristics, and texture of spaces, perception filters could have both active and inactive roles in impacting the spatial decision-making of participants between the two systems. In addition, between the two systems, participant characteristics had more impact on size variations for both types of spaces—fully enclosed and corridors—for accommodating larger groups.

Spatial perception in virtual reality systems relies on a number of variables, including how users explore, observe and perceive the spatial factors of a virtual environment. In virtual reality systems, users can assume different types of views for spatial decision-making about the sizes and scales of and relationships among virtual spaces. This research explored the role of view usage patterns in spatial cognition and decision-making in a fully immersive virtual reality system and monitor-based virtual reality system. The focus of study was the impact of using the eye-level view as the only view type in a fully immersive virtual reality system on actual and perceived view usage patterns in a monitor-based virtual reality system. In addition, users’ spatial decision-making results were compared with regards to system usage sequence and view type. Quantitative and qualitative data, descriptive and inferential statistical comparisons, and testing of both systems were used to determine the participants’ performances concerning view usage patterns and the design outcomes. The results showed a moderate association between the view type utilized for spatial perception in a monitor-based virtual reality system and variations in system usage sequence. In addition, for both systems, variations in system usage sequence, space type, and other characteristics all affected the strength of the linear regressions of the sizes and scales of the design outcomes.

A trend of distance underestimations in Virtual Reality (VR) is well documented, but the reason still remains unclear. Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of differently sized Virtual Environments (VEs) on egocentric distance perception in VR as a potential influence. Verbal assessment, blind walking, and our own proposed method: walk and assess, were compared in an experiment, and blind walking was found to be the most accurate. A virtual replica of a real-life location was created as a transitional environment, while small (15m2), medium (35m2) and large (95m2) rooms were created to investigate the effect of VE size on spatial perception in VR. To establish the differences in estimations between the real world and VR when using blind walking, a study was conducted with the virtual replica and its real life counterpart at distances between 1 and 10 meters. Following this, the three distinct room sizes were used in an experiment to investigate the effect of the size of rooms on spatial perception in VR. The findings showed consistent underestimates of distances, and a trend for underestimation to grow as the distance grows was observed. Similarly, underestimates grew with the size of the environment.

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Embodied self-motion illusions (“vection”) have long fascinated both researchers and laypeople. With the increasing quality and affordability of immersive virtual reality and tele-operation/tele-robotics interfaces, there is also increasing interest in providing compelling sensations of self-motions to create more life-like and convincing experiences. Whereas most research on self-motion perception focuses on visual and vestibular contributions, auditory can also play a relevant role. Here, we will provide an overview on research indicating how spatialized sound (moving sound fields) can both induce self-motion illusions in blindfolded listeners and enhance self-motion illusions induced by other modalities. Auditory vection by itself can be enhanced by a number of factors, including increasing the number of moving sound sources and employing sound sources that are more likely to be interpreted as originating from stationary objects (“acoustic landmarks” such as church bells) than artificial sounds or sounds associated with moving objects such as footstep sounds or car sounds. Although auditory cues alone provide a much less compelling self-motion sensation than visual cues or biomechanical cues (e.g., from walking on a circular treadmill), they can significantly enhance vection induced by other modalities as well as enhance presence and immersion in virtual environments. These findings will be discussed both in the context of multi-modal cue integration and self-motion simulation applications such as Virtual Reality, where high-quality spatialized sound could often be included at relatively low cost.

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The notion of body-based scaling suggests that our body and its action capabilities are used to scale the spatial layout of the environment. Here we present four studies supporting this perspective by showing that the hand acts as a metric which individuals use to scale the apparent sizes of objects in the environment. However to test this, one must be able to manipulate the size and/or dimensions of the perceiver's hand which is difficult in the real world due to impliability of hand dimensions. To overcome this limitation, we used virtual reality to manipulate dimensions of participants' fully-tracked, virtual hands to investigate its influence on the perceived size and shape of virtual objects. In a series of experiments, using several measures, we show that individuals' estimations of the sizes of virtual objects differ depending on the size of their virtual hand in the direction consistent with the body-based scaling hypothesis. Additionally, we found that these effects were specific to participants' virtual hands rather than another avatar's hands or a salient familiar-sized object. While these studies provide support for a body-based approach to the scaling of the spatial layout, they also demonstrate the influence of virtual bodies on perception of virtual environments.

With the rapid advance of real-time computer graphics, head-mounted displays (HMDs) have become popular tools for 3D visualization. One of the most promising and challenging future uses of HMDs, however, is in applications where virtual environments enhance rather than replace real environments. In such applications, a virtual image is superimposed on a real image. The unique problem raised by this superimposition is the difficulty that the human visual system may have in integrating information from these two environments. As a starting point to studying the problem of information integration in see-through environments, we investigate the quantification of depth and size perception of virtual objects relative to real objects in combined real and virtual environments. This starting point leads directly to the important issue of system calibration, which must be completed before perceived depth and sizes are measured. Finally, preliminary experimental results on the perceived depth of spatially nonoverlapping real and virtual objects are presented.

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Following verbal route instructions requires knowledge of language, space, action and perception. We present MARCO, an agent that follows free-form, natural language route instructions by representing and executing a sequence of compound action specifications that model which actions to take under which conditions. MARCO infers implicit actions from knowledge of both linguistic conditional phrases and from spatial action and local configurations. Thus, MARCO performs explicit actions, implicit actions necessary to achieve the stated conditions, and exploratory actions to learn about the world. We gathered a corpus of 786 route instructions from six people in three large-scale virtual indoor environments. Thirtysix other people followed these instructions and rated them for quality. These human participants finished at the intended destination on 69 % of the trials. MARCO followed the same instructions in the same environments, with a success rate of 61%. We measured the efficacy of action inference with MARCO variants lacking action inference: executing only explicit actions, MARCO succeeded on just 28 % of the trials. For this task, inferring implicit actions is essential to follow poor instructions, but is also crucial for many highly-rated route instructions.

This chapter grapples with the hegemony of the visual and its pervasiveness in current urban installations. It discusses how technology and the visual are fetishized instead of used in their dialogical potential to engage people in socio-spatial transformation. This chapter presents the trajectory of the Graphics Laboratory for Architectural Experience at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil (LAGEAR) in its theoretical and practical development. This chapter then discusses LAGEAR's main drives, which are the playful interaction, the distinction between interface, and interaction and dialogue, in order to create interactive interfaces that actually engage people in socio-spatial transformation. It presents examples of the authors' works, drawing from visually based to bodily engaging and socio-political installations. Discussion concerns the problematization that leads to the need of engagement rather than the bodily engagement. Emphasis was put on working with the socio-spatial context and proposing interfaces that take into account the process in its openness and indeterminacy instead of prescribing a product (even if an interface-product).

Journal Article Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence Get access Jonathan Steuer Jonathan Steuer 1Jonathan Steuer is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, Stanford, California. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 42, Issue 4, December 1992, Pages 73–93, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1992.tb00812.x Published: 07 February 2006

During the past decades, the virtual reality community has based its development on a synthesis of earlier work in interactive 3D graphics, user interfaces, and visual simulation. Currently, the VR field is transitioning into work influenced by video games. Because much of the research and development being conducted in the games community parallels the VR community's efforts, it has the potential to affect a greater audience. Given these trends, VR researchers who want their work to remain relevant must realign to focus on game research and development. Leveraging technology from the visual simulation and virtual reality communities, serious games provide a delivery system for organizational video game instruction and training.

What does it feel like to own, to control, and to be inside a body? The multidimensional nature of this experience together with the continuous presence of one's biological body, render both theoretical and experimental approaches problematic. Nevertheless, exploitation of immersive virtual reality has allowed a reframing of this question to whether it is possible to experience the same sensations towards a virtual body inside an immersive virtual environment as toward the biological body, and if so, to what extent. The current paper addresses these issues by referring to the Sense of Embodiment (SoE). Due to the conceptual confusion around this sense, we provide a working definition which states that SoE consists of three subcomponents: the sense of self-location, the sense of agency, and the sense of body ownership. Under this proposed structure, measures and experimental manipulations reported in the literature are reviewed and related challenges are outlined. Finally, future experimental studies are proposed to overcome those challenges, toward deepening the concept of SoE and enhancing it in virtual applications.

Understanding Virtual Reality arrives at a time when the technologies behind virtual reality have advanced to the point that it is possible to develop and deploy meaningful, productive virtual reality applications. The aim of this thorough, accessible exploration is to help you take advantage of this moment, equipping you with the understanding needed to identify and prepare for ways VR can be used in your field, whatever your field may be. By approaching VR as a communications medium, the authors have created a resource that will remain relevant even as the underlying technologies evolve. You get a history of VR, along with a good look at systems currently in use. However, the focus remains squarely on the application of VR and the many issues that arise in the application design and implementation, including hardware requirements, system integration, interaction techniques, and usability. This book also counters both exaggerated claims for VR and the view that would reduce it to entertainment, citing dozens of real-world examples from many different fields and presenting (in a series of appendices) four in-depth application case studies. * Substantive, illuminating coverage designed for technical and business readers and well-suited to the classroom. * Examines VR's constituent technologies, drawn from visualization, representation, graphics, human-computer interaction, and other fields, and explains how they are being united in cohesive VR systems. * Via a companion Web site, provides additional case studies, tutorials, instructional materials, and a link to an open-source VR programming system. Table of Contents Foreword Preface Part I - What is Virtual Reality? Chapter 1: Introduction to Virtual Reality - What it is and Where it Comes From Chapter 2: VR the Medium Part II - Virtual Reality Systems Chapter 3: Interface to the Virtual World -- Input Chapter 4: Interface to the Virtual World -- Output Chapter 5: Rendering a Virtual World Chapter 6: Interacting with a Virtual World Chapter 7: Virtual Reality Experience Chapter 8: Experience Design: Applying VR to a Problem Chapter 9: What Dreams May Come: The Future of VR Appendices A: NICE educational application (EVL) B: Crumbs visualization application (NCSA) C: Aircraft wiring application (Boeing, Inc.) D: Placeholder artistic application (Interval Research)

Immersive virtual environments can break the deep, everyday connection between where our senses tell us we are and where we are actually located and whom we are with. The concept of 'presence' refers to the phenomenon of behaving and feeling as if we are in the virtual world created by computer displays. In this article, we argue that presence is worthy of study by neuroscientists, and that it might aid the study of perception and consciousness.

From the Publisher: Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of reality? As Marie-Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals—getting lost in a good book, for example—we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading. Ryan's analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, electronic poetry, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role-playing games. Interspersed among the book's chapters are several interludes that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call virtual reality, including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext novel Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I'm Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory—the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text's creation. About the Author: Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and former software consultant. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory and the editor of Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory.

Many studies showed the ability of movies and imagery techniques to elicit emotions. Nevertheless, it is less clear how to manipulate the content of interactive media to induce specific emotional responses. In particular, this is true for the emerging medium virtual reality (VR), whose main feature is the ability to induce a feeling of "presence" in the computer-generated world experienced by the user. The main goal of this study was to analyze the possible use of VR as an affective medium. Within this general goal, the study also analyzed the relationship between presence and emotions. The results confirmed the efficacy of VR as affective medium: the interaction with "anxious" and "relaxing" virtual environments produced anxiety and relaxation. The data also showed a circular interaction between presence and emotions: on one side, the feeling of presence was greater in the "emotional" environments; on the other side, the emotional state was influenced by the level of presence. The significance of these results for the assessment of affective interaction is discussed.

AudienceMR is designed as a multi-user mixed reality space that seamlessly extends the local user space to become a large, shared classroom where some of the audience members are seen seated in a real space, and more members are seen through an extended portal. AudienceMR can provide a sense of the presence of a large-scale crowd/audience with the associated spatial context. In contrast to virtual reality (VR), however, with mixed reality (MR), a lecturer can deliver content or conduct a performance from a real, actual, comfortable, and familiar local space, while interacting directly with real nearby objects, such as a desk, podium, educational props, instruments, and office materials. Such a design will elicit a realistic user experience closer to an actual classroom, which is currently prohibitive owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper validated our hypothesis by conducting a comparative experiment assessing the lecturer’s experience with two independent variables: (1) an online classroom platform type, i.e., a 2D desktop video teleconference, a 2D video screen grid in VR, 3D VR, and AudienceMR, and (2) a student depiction, i.e., a 2D upper-body video screen and a 3D full-body avatar. Our experiment validated that AudienceMR exhibits a level of anxiety and fear of public speaking closer to that of a real classroom situation, and a higher social and spatial presence than 2D video grid-based solutions and even 3D VR. Compared to 3D VR, AudienceMR offers a more natural and easily usable real object-based interaction. Most subjects preferred AudienceMR over the alternatives despite the nuisance of having to wear a video see-through headset. Such qualities will result in information conveyance and an educational efficacy comparable to those of a real classroom, and better than those achieved through popular 2D desktop teleconferencing or immersive 3D VR solutions.

Forward: By David Chalmers / Acknowledgements / Introduction: BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDED / I: From Embodiment to Cognitive Extension - 1. The Active Body: 1.1 A Walk on the Wild Side 1.2 Inhabited Interaction 1.3 Active Sensing 1.4 Distributed Functional Decomposition 1.5 Sensing for Coupling 1.6 Information Self-Structuring 1.7 Perception, Qualia, and Sensorimotor Expectations 1.8 Time and Mind 1.9 Dynamics and (Soft) Computation. 1.10 Out from the Bedrock 2. The Negotiable Body: 2.1 Where the Rubber Meets the Road 2.2 What's in an Interface? 2.3 New Systemic Wholes 2.4 Substitutes 2.5 Incorporation Vs Use 2.6 Towards Cognitive Extension 2.7 Three Grades of Embodiment 3. Material Symbols: 3.1 Language as Scaffolding 3.2 Augmenting Reality 3.3 Sculpting Attention 3.4 Hybrid Thoughts? 3.5 From Translation to Coordination 3.6 Second-order Cognitive Dynamics 3.7 Self-made Minds. 4. World, Incorporated: 4.1 Cognitive Niche Construction: A Primer 4.2 Cognition in the Globe: A Cameo 4.3 Thinking Space 4.4 Epistemic Engineers 4.5 Exploitative Representation and Wide Computation 4.6 Tetris: The Update 4.7 The Swirl of Organization 4.8 Extending the Mind 4.9 BRAINBOUND versus EXTENDED: The Case So Far. II. Boundary Disputes - 5. Mind Re-bound?: 5.1 EXTENDED Anxiety 5.2 Pencil Me In 5.3 The Odd Coupling 5.4 Cognitive Candidacy 5.5 The Mark of the Cognitive? 5.6 Kinds and Minds 5.7 Perception and Development 5.8 Deception and Contested Space 5.9 Folk Intuition and Cognitive Extension 5.10 Asymmetry and Lopsideness 5.11 Similarity vs Complementarity 5.12 Hippo-World 6. The Cure for Cognitive Hiccups (HEMC, HEC, HEMC): 6.1 Rupert's Challenge 6.2 HEC versus HEMC 6.3 Parity and Cognitive Kinds (Again) 6.4 The Persisting Core 6.5 Cognitive Impartiality 6.6 A Brain Teaser 6.7 Thoughtful Gestures 6.8 Material Carriers 6.9 Loops as Mechanisms 6.10 Anarchic Self-Stimulation 6.11Autonomous Coupling 6.12 Why the HEC? 6.13 The Cure 7. Rediscovering the Brain: 7.1 Matter into Mind 7.2.Honey, I Shrunk the Representations 7.3 Change Spotting: The Sequel 7.4 Thinking about Thinking: The Brain's Eye View.: 7.5 Born-Again Cartesians? 7.6 Surrogate Situations 7.7 Plug Points 7.8 Brain Control 7.9 Asymmetry Arguments 7.10 Extended in a Vat 7.11 The (Situated) Cognizer's Innards III: The Limits of Embodiment - 8. Painting, Planning, and Perceiving: 8.1 Enacting Perceptual Experience 8.2 The Painter and the Perceiver 8.3 Three Virtues of the Strong Sensorimotor Model 8.4 A Vice: Sensorimotor (Hyper) Sensitivity 8.5 What Reaching Teaches 8.6 (Tweaked)Tele-Assistance 8.7 Sensorimotor Summarizing 8.8 Virtual Content, Again 8.9 Beyond the Sensorimotor Frontier 9. Disentangling Embodiment: 9.1 Three Threads 9.2 The Separability Thesis 9.3 Beyond Flesh-eating Functionalism. 9.4 Ada, Adder, and Odder 9.5 A Tension Revealed 9.6 What Bodies Are 9.7 Participant Machinery and Morphological Computation 9.8 Quantifying Embodiment 9.9 The Heideggerian Theatre / 10. Conclusions: Mindsized Bites / Appendix: The Extended Mind (Andy Clark and David Chalmers)

How does the changing representation of the body in virtual environments affect the mind? This article considers how virtual reality interfaces are evolving to embody the user progressively. The effect of embodiment on the sensation of physical presence, social presence, and self presence in virtual environments is discussed. The effect of avatar representation on body image and body schema distortion is also considered. The paper ends with the introduction of the cyborg's dilemma, a paradoxical situation in which the development of increasingly “natural” and embodied interfaces leads to “unnatural” adaptations or changes in the user. In the progressively tighter coupling of user to interface, the user evolves as a cyborg.

Abstract Within an ongoing debate about the relationships between the body and technological experiences within virtual reality (VR), there has hitherto been limited consideration of the spatial. Geographers, meanwhile, have only just begun to engage with VR and its spatialities but have paid less attention to its embodiment. The technology allows users to go beyond merely imagining themselves in a different world, creating a real sense of presence in the digital realm. Immersion and presence in VR are, however, a mix of space, embodiment and the digital. As such, any discussion of VR requires critical consideration of both embodiment and space. This paper therefore explores some of the linkages between bodies, spaces and VR to demonstrate how engagement with VR can enrich geographical scholarship.

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During the last half of the twentieth century, psychologists and anthropologists have studied proxemics, or spacing behavior, among people in many contexts. As we enter the twenty-first century, immersive virtual environment technology promises new experimental venues in which researchers can study proxemics. Immersive virtual environments provide realistic and compelling experimental settings without sacrificing experimental control. The experiment reported here tested Argyle and Dean's (1965) equilibrium theory's specification of an inverse relationship between mutual gaze, a nonverbal cue signaling intimacy, and interpersonal distance. Participants were immersed in a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human representation (that is, an embodied agent) stood. Under the guise of a memory task, participants walked towards and around the agent. Distance between the participant and agent was tracked automatically via our immersive virtual environment system. All participants maintained more space around agents than they did around similarly sized and shaped but nonhuman-like objects. Female participants maintained more interpersonal distance between themselves and agents who engaged them in eye contact (that is, mutual gaze behavior) than between themselves and agents who did not engage them in eye contact, whereas male participants did not. Implications are discussed for the study of proxemics via immersive virtual environment technology, as well as the design of virtual environments and virtual humans.

Embodied virtual reality faithfully renders users' movements onto an avatar in a virtual 3D environment, supporting nuanced nonverbal behavior alongside verbal communication. To investigate communication behavior within this medium, we had 30 dyads complete two tasks using a shared visual workspace: negotiating an apartment layout and placing model furniture on an apartment floor plan. Dyads completed both tasks under three different conditions: face-to-face, embodied VR with visible full-body avatars, and no embodiment VR, where the participants shared a virtual space, but had no visible avatars. Both subjective measures of users' experiences and detailed annotations of verbal and nonverbal behavior are used to understand how the media impact communication behavior. Embodied VR provides a high level of social presence with conversation patterns that are very similar to face-to-face interaction. In contrast, providing only the shared environment was generally found to be lonely and appears to lead to degraded communication.

Few HMD-based virtual environment systems display a rendering of the user's own body. Subjectively, this often leads to a sense of disembodiment in the virtual world. We explore the effect of being able to see one's own body in such systems on an objective measure of the accuracy of one form of space perception. Using an action-based response measure, we found that participants who explored near space while seeing a fully-articulated and tracked visual representation of themselves subsequently made more accurate judgments of absolute egocentric distance to locations ranging from 4 m to 6 m away from where they were standing than did participants who saw no avatar. A nonanimated avatar also improved distance judgments, but by a lesser amount. Participants who viewed either animated or static avatars positioned 3 m in front of their own position made subsequent distance judgments with similar accuracy to the participants who viewed the equivalent animated or static avatar positioned at their own location. We discuss the implications of these results on theories of embodied perception in virtual environments.

We discuss and reflect on the importance of embodiment, context, and spatial proximity as they pertain to the sense of presence obtained by individuals in virtual environments. We propose Embodied Social Presence (ESP) Theory, a theoretical framework that focuses on the embodied virtual representation (i.e., the avatar) as the nexus of activity in social interaction within virtual worlds. We review the literature on place and space, presence and embodiment and draw on theories of embodiment, feminism, and Activity Theory to frame our model. We propose that a social actor in a virtual environment derives meaning during interactions with his or her environment through actions, context, and tools and that the virtual body is a tool for mediating communication.

She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain (J.G. Ballard, 1975: 40). Now, the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, blurred by cybernetic and bio-technologies, seem less sharp; the body, itself invaded and re-shaped by technology, invades and permeates the space outside, even as this space takes on dimensions that themselves confuse the inner and the outer, visually, mentally and physically (Anthony Vidler, 1990: 37–8). The body-territory [corpo-territorio] poses a problematic form of corporeal identity that in becoming ever more routinized has tended to dissolve the distinctions that formerly existed between the organic and the inorganic (Tiziana Villani, 1995: 118). As she tentatively begins to play the piano, the replicant, named Rachel, recalls that she once had lessons but cannot be sure whether these memories are her own or simply the implanted memories of someone else. In this poignant scene in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) we explore the possibility that human identities might be artificially created in order to produce advanced androids whose intelligence and sensitivity is comparable with that of their human creators. The figure of the cyborg, as represented in science fiction cinema, is not an automaton or robot but a sophisticated creation that seems to simultaneously extend but also threaten our understanding of what it means to be human. If we were to locate the cyborg as an idea, we could say that it is clearly linked to fantastical combinations of bodies and machines but is nonetheless a way of thinking about the world. It is, in other words, an ontological strategy for extending the limits to human knowledge as well as an apposite means of describing those phenomena that appear to reside outside conventional frameworks of understanding. If a cyborgian sensibility is explored within the context of the contemporary city, we find that it has developed out of several interconnecting strands of thought as a trope of critical reflection which uncovers a series of anomalies, fractures and tensions lurking within dominant modes of urban and architectural thinking. Since the early 1960s the potential applications of the cyborg concept have proliferated to include developments such as whole organism cloning, in vitro fertilization, gene sequencing, advanced prosthetics and other sophisticated medical technologies. In tandem with these technological manifestations, the imaginative field of the cyborg has expanded through literature, cinema and the fantasy spaces of contemporary culture.1 It is since the mid-1980s, however, that the idea of the cyborg has been associated with a more densely argued series of theoretical applications as a means to explore the interface between technology and the body. The key intervention here is Donna Haraway's article entitled 'A Cyborg Manifesto', first published in the Socialist Review in 1985, and later included in her influential collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs and Women where she writes in her introduction (1991a: 1): A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. But, cyborgs are compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century. Cyborgs are post-Second World War hybrid entities made of, first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen "high-technological" guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring, and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses. This succinct and revealing definition reminds us that the idea of the cyborg, as originally elaborated by Haraway, is at root a political as well as an intellectual project, an idea which originated in and from the 'belly of the monster' (1991a: 4), that nexus of political and economic entanglements that we might term the 'first world' in distinction to the proliferating spaces of marginality that lie beyond.2 Since its inception as a critical intellectual concept in the 1980s the cyborg metaphor has been deployed to challenge disembodied, dualistic, masculinist and teleological bodies of knowledge. It has infused science and technology studies with feminist epistemological strategies. It has opened up new possibilities for the understanding of relations between nature and culture. And it has facilitated greater sensitivity towards social and spatial complexity through its emphasis on 'situated knowledges'. The idea of the cyborg shares an affinity with related concepts such as 'cyberspace', 'cybernetics' and 'cyberpunk'. Yet the contemporary use of the term 'cyborg' is different from these virtual, analytical and fictional constructs because it is grounded in the living and breathing flesh of the human body. Whilst the 'cyber-' metaphor has tended to be associated with various forms of virtuality, the idea of the cyborg is closely linked with the corporeal experience of space.3 In this sense the cyborg can be read as an alternative way of conceptualizing the growth and development of cities that serves to destabilize the pervasive narratives of dematerialization, spatial malleability and virtualization. The underlying materiality of the cyborg metaphor has acquired heightened significance now that the earlier polarity between virtual space and 'meat space' articulated in the first wave of cyber literature is losing its conceptual utility and now that the very idea of 'virtual reality' is itself imploding as it becomes either relocated in the context of a heightened dimension of the real (see, for example, Žižek, 2002) or simply derided as an inherently oxymoronic formulation (see Grosz, 2001).4 The emphasis of the cyborg on the material interface between the body and the city is perhaps most strikingly manifested in the physical infrastructure that links the human body to vast technological networks. If we understand the cyborg to be a cybernetic creation, a hybrid of machine and organism, then urban infrastructures can be conceptualized as a series of interconnecting life-support systems (see Swyngedouw, 1996; Marras, 1999; Gandy, 2002; Mitchell, 2003). The modern home, for example, has become a complex exoskeleton for the human body with its provision of water, warmth, light and other essential needs. The home can be conceived as 'prosthesis and prophylactic' in which modernist distinctions between nature and culture, and between the organic and the inorganic, become blurred (Vidler, 1990: 37). And beyond the boundaries of the home itself we find a vast interlinked system of networks, pipes and wires that enable the modern city to function. These interstitial spaces of connectivity within individual buildings extend through urban space to produce a multi-layered structure of extraordinary complexity and utility. The figure of the cyborg is at root a spatial metaphor. But how does the idea of the cyborg intersect with spatial theory? In what ways does the cyborg reinforce or contradict other emerging strands of urban thought that also emphasize urban complexity and hybridity? Has the epistemological subtlety and political prescience of the cyborg, as originally formulated in the 1980s, been realized in practice or simply been diffused through the term's widening usage? And should we ultimately reject the idea of the cyborg as an anachronism derived from cold war science and the first generation of twentieth-century cyberpunk culture? In the rest of this article I will try to address these issues through an exploration of the somewhat haphazard presence of the cyborg in contemporary urban discourse. I will focus in particular on the example of urban infrastructure as a concrete manifestation of the cyborg idea in order to explore different facets of the relationship between the city, the body and the human subject. My aim is not to foreclose discussions surrounding the 'cyborg city' but to open up a series of dialogues in order to explore contemporary thinking around these questions. One of the principal difficulties with delineating the cyborg city as a clearly defined entity is derived from the entanglement of the cyborg idea with a variety of urban metaphors ranging from organicist conceptions of the nineteenth-century city to 'neo-organicist' representations of the post-industrial metropolis. In its classic nineteenth-century form the organicist conception of the city emerged out of a functional analogy, originating within the medical sciences, wherein spatial differentiation corresponded with a distinctive arrangement of human organs. We find that Kantian notions of the self-organizational characteristics of animate matter were combined with new insights into the human vascular and arterial system and an emerging circulatory emphasis within the nascent science of political economy. In recent years, however, the organicist emphasis on the city as an integrated body with identifiable organs, which emerged in response to the nineteenth-century industrial city, has been increasingly displaced by the idea of urban space as a prosthetic extension to the human body. The body-city problematic has been reconceptualized in the context of post-Cartesian and post-positivist modes of thinking. The emphasis on the city as a self-contained body or machine has been challenged by a hybridized conception of space as a system of technological devices that enhances human productive and imaginative capabilities. The cyborg metaphor not only reworks the metabolic preoccupations of the nineteenth-century industrial city but also extends to a contemporary body of ideas that we can term 'neo-organicist' on account of the deployment of biophysical metaphors for the interpretation of social and spatial complexity. In the neo-organicist city we encounter a shift of emphasis away from an anatomical conception of space as an assemblage of individual organs towards a neurological reading of space as a diffuse and interconnected realm of human interaction. The film maker Michael Burke, for example, director of Cyborg City (1999), describes how beneath the 'glass and concrete' of the future city there will be a 'humming mass of technology' acting as a central nervous system, 'constantly monitoring and controlling both its own functions and those of its citizens' (Burke, 1998).5 The mechanical and hierarchical model of the relationship between the body and the city has been supplanted by a more complex and non-linear pattern of urban development in response to the spread of new information technologies (see Gille, 1986; Rabinbach, 1990; Akira, 2001). The organicist city of the modern era was founded on a clear separation between mind and body that enabled the city to be conceptualized as a coherent entity to be acted upon, disciplined, regulated and shaped according to human will. The emergence of the neo-organicist city, in contrast, is founded on the blurring of boundaries rather than their repeated delineation. At the same time, however, there remain important continuities between the kind of machine-based metaphors associated with the early twentieth-century futurism of figures such as Mario Chiattone, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Antoniono Sant'Elia and the elaborate computer-based metaphors deployed in the contemporary city (see Villani, 1995; Boyer, 1996; Schaub, 1998). Other significant continuities include, for example, the avant-garde bricolage of early cinema and the surrealist bodies depicted in the art of Hans Bellmer, Francis Picabia and other responses to 'a sterile and over rationalised technological realism' (Vidler, 1990: 42).6 These interconnecting strands between cultural modernism and the emergence of the cyborg metaphor are significant because they underlie the centrality of corporeal metaphors for the critical interpretation of urban form. The current emphasis on corporeal and neurological analogies in the neo-organicist literature owes more to earlier developments than is widely acknowledged. We can detect two principal dimensions to contemporary neo-organicist urban thought. A first strand, rooted in the bio-physical sciences, perceives the city to be a special kind of complex, yet intricately ordered system. This homeostatic perspective, which is inflected by ecological thinking and recent developments in evolutionary biology, has diffused through parts of the architectural literature and is only tangentially linked with the epistemological challenge of cyborg theory.7 A second and more intellectually significant development is represented by the convergence of ideas surrounding the 'thinking space' of the city and the indeterminacy of spatial forms. If the body-city nexus is conceptualized as a thinking machine then the analytical focus shifts towards the identification of those critical networks or 'neurones' that sustain the relationship between the body and the city (Kurokawa, 2001a). Though this dimension to the neo-organicist perspective shares important continuities with the technological preoccupations of early twentieth-century modernism, it extends its conceptual purview into different aspects of cultural modernism. The influential speculations of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for example, develop Antonin Artaud's conception of the 'body without organs' to produce a philosophy of spatial complexity quite different from that associated with dominant modernist traditions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986; 1987; Rajchman, 2000; Uno, 2001). Their philosophical challenge is to perceive space in the absence of any previously existent categories, hierarchies or systems as a form of 'anarchic non-identical proliferation' (Luckhurst, 1997: 128). The organic metaphor of the 'rhizome' is deployed in distinction to 'arborescent' conceptions of cities as hierarchical structures (Teysott, 1990; Akira, 2001; Kurokawa, 2001a). In addition to this emphasis on non-hierarchical structures of difference Deleuze and Guattari's conception of concrete space also seeks to incorporate the imaginary, libidinous and oneiric realms of human experience. From their 'neo-vitalist' perspective, which builds on the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson, the virtual realm is not simply a mimesis or reflection of physical reality but an independent domain that generates new kinds of spaces and ideas. The political significance of the virtual realm lies in its experimental and emergent role as part of an envisioned space that has yet to be realized within the taken-for-granted realm of concrete reality (Boundas, 1996; Massumi, 2001). The role of the diagram or 'abstract machine' takes on special significance in this context as an attempt to give visual expression to new models of reality.8 In the case of architecture, for example, there has been an intense dialogue between developments in building design and the speculative possibilities engendered by computer-aided simulations so that 'physical space increasingly resembles cyberspace' (Mitchell, 2003: 197). Some architectural practices have deployed so-called 'genetic algorithms' in order to generate a form of 'in vitro' architecture which derives its inspiration from nature yet remains autonomous from it as a purely digitized space of imaginative exploration (see Chu, 2002; De Landa, 2002).9 Examples of architectural practice inflected by post-structuralist ideas which move beyond purely 'in vitro' speculations to fully realized projects include the work of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, where sophisticated combinations of form, structure and materials have been achieved, which are quite at odds with modernist conceptions of architectural form. A conceptual synthesis can be discerned in some of the recent literature between post-structuralist philosophies of space and Latourian conceptions of actor-network theory to produce a new kind of urban theorization which eschews the meta-narratives associated with neo-Marxian approaches. Building on the insights of Deleuze and Guattari these approaches have sought to remove all the extrinsic or foundational aspects to urban theory and pare analysis down to the movements and interactions that constitute 'the city' as a particular kind of spatial form or activity that is independent of conventional accounts of scale, structure or order.10 The brain or 'thinking space' of the city persists yet is dispersed through innumerable nodes and networks in contrast with the embodied cyborg citizen to be found in the more technophile literature. We can trace these developments back to the emerging critique of architectural modernism in the 1970s and 1980s that increasingly drew on the theoretical ontologies of post-structuralism in order to advance a radically unplanned built form.11 From this perspective the role of 'chaos', for example, takes on a very different significance from that associated with the modernist city and is perceived as a field of evolutionary and radical experimentation. Chaos is no longer seen as an anomalous dimension to the urban experience to be problematized or excluded from analysis but a rich vein of social and spatial interaction through which we may perceive signs of alternative or hitherto overlooked urban forms. Chaos may also be characterized as a more sophisticated, resilient and adaptable form of order as Rem Koolhaas has suggested with respect to the dynamics of West African urbanism (Koolhaas et al., 2001; Koolhaas, 2002). The theoretical novelty of such a perspective sits sharply at odds, however, with the capacity for what one might term 'avant-garde urbanism' to actually explicate any substantial dimensions to urban change (see, for example, Rauterberg, 2002; Gandy, 2004b). We can detect within urban and architectural discourse an emerging counter current to post-structuralist and avant-garde urbanism led by a of and political (see 1996; and 1998). Though the post-structuralism of Deleuze and Guattari seeks to between the and the and is in this respect a significant advance on the and of there is a in any kind of political critique of the cyborg The emphasis on the characteristics of urban space the particular combinations of and human that enable nodes within the urban system to play in the of cultural and economic The of structure the of the theoretical and significance of these insights the between post-structuralism and a cyborg sensibility towards the entanglement of the real and the We are with an between the reading of the industrial city and a 'neo-organicist' with the design of space that quite in architectural The emerging of the interface as a technological is associated with nineteenth-century over science and technology, for example, form part of a counter discourse to modernist of technological 1996; 2003). In recent years, however, the trope of technological has tended to between a of new towards excluded on the one and the of towards technology and its on the other The of the cyborg has engendered a new wave of and towards the of the body by technologies that threaten to or the human subject. In the of for example, we move beyond the and critique of technology towards a political of technology and its with the human body. the of the body by new technologies as a of that the critical of the earlier in and communications technologies 1997: the advance of a in which the of towards an of the human body itself so that we no longer of the body in the city but of the in the (see 1995; The cyborg figure becomes a for the of we are no longer with a cold war but with the of the around the of buildings in of and their The of the have been radically by new technologies of and in order to the of the century. structures have developed that of social such as with forms of social through a of and The significance of urban in particular is now towards which the of essential technological networks such as and in order to and of political A of modern from urban technological networks or to use expression is to a of so that they are no longer political but for (see also a of from whole the of through a of and of the more of technology we can an emphasis on the cyborg as a means of becoming in order to the human body from the boundaries of the autonomous In the work of Mitchell, for example, we can trace a from through the experience of to the contemporary urban citizen as 'a (Mitchell, 2003: writes have been with the body and its now they virtual bodies that can sense and at a but that also remain in their In this sense builds on the inflected of earlier such as and depicted as a series of on infrastructures the extraordinary technological of the cyber city and the interaction of with of human activity (Mitchell, 2003). Yet this is a future in which the and of space are for example, that we are 'the shift from a by boundaries and to a at scale, by networks, and but the between the of and that of to economic In the perspective is so by technological change that it begins to the role of an independent in The blurring of boundaries between the body and the city in to our understanding of the human and the characteristics of human conception of human include, for the role of biophysical and technological systems that the social of for example, has different of analysis to the extension of our conception of to include those structures and that have been excluded from both and epistemological traditions the work of has tended to emphasize the between human and nature the of has been the or of between different kinds of networks or structures The cyborg can be conceived in a Latourian sense as both a new kind of social interaction with space but also a concept to be conceived in to the realm of modernist urban thought. Yet a Latourian with its hybridized conceptions of is quite different from that within philosophical traditions because of the radical extension of human to those and systems which the sought to from the realm of and political The concept of also its own its own of between its The idea of the cyborg as a hybrid can be conceived as a problematic of derived from or some teleological for urban change but it can also a of ideas and developments from the to the The of and for example, can be explored in of combinations of practices and ideas from (see, for example, 1995; 1995; 2003). The cyborg metaphor can be in this sense as an of the limits to or teleological architectural rooted in and conceptions of cultural that we have been we could that we have led a cyborg since human has a of cultural and technological ranging from the of to the developments in materials But if we any or to the cyborg idea we its analytical utility as a means to with the cultural and technological complexity of the contemporary The of human in the cyborg city to the between technological change and the of the from the industrial But can the cyborg idea us to understand the dynamics of infrastructure provision in to a digitized or diffuse conception of the If the interactions between human and have the idea that is the of human then this of the insights of cultural that have quite on the of material and systems of cultural The made by for example, over the of locate these within the context of a more experience of within which to a different of and the other are in a sense is that new forms of are a more integrated rather than system of that the of modern and experience. political discourse is grounded within the context of the of the of the realm and the radical indeterminacy of the human subject. If the can be as an and and realm of human we are with the of delineating the characteristics of the human in a cyborg If the body-city interface is conceptualized as a then the distinction between mind and body and between the material and the virtual becomes But what the human is increasingly with the of the city Whilst it is to that our hybridized interactions with space a greater role for and (Mitchell, 2003: it is to of as a digitized of interactions with not only other but also machines and networks. The for example, describes a emerging between an

Over the last few years, the efforts to reveal through neuroscientific lens the relations between the mind, body, and built environment have set a promising direction of using neuroscience for architecture. However, little has been achieved thus far in developing a systematic account that could be employed for interpreting current results and providing a consistent framework for subsequent scientific experimentation. In this context, the enactive perspective is proposed as a guide to studying architectural experience for two key reasons. Firstly, the enactive approach is specifically selected for its capacity to account for the profound connectedness of the organism and the world in an active and dynamic relationship, which is primarily shaped by the features of the body. Thus, particular emphasis is placed on the issues of embodiment and motivational factors as underlying constituents of the body-architecture interactions. Moreover, enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of architectural spaces singles out the two-way bodily communication between architecture and its inhabitants, which can be also explored in immersive virtual reality settings. Secondly, enactivism has a strong foothold in phenomenological thinking that corresponds to the existing phenomenological discourse in architectural theory and qualitative design approaches. In this way, the enactive approach acknowledges the available common ground between neuroscience and architecture and thus allows a more accurate definition of investigative goals. Accordingly, the outlined model of architectural subject in enactive terms-that is, a model of a human being as embodied, enactive, and situated agent, is proposed as a basis of neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.

How does the representation of an embodied avatar influence the way in which one perceives the scale of a virtual environment? In virtual reality, it is common to embody avatars of various appearances, from abstract to realistic. It is known that changes in the realism of virtual hands affect the self-body perception, including body ownership. However, the influence of self-avatar realism on the perception of non-body objects has not been investigated. Considering the theory that the scale of the external environment is perceived relative to the size of one's body (body-based scaling), it can be hypothesized that the realism of an avatar affects not only body ownership but also the fidelity of the avatar with respect to our own body as a metric. Therefore, this study examines how avatar realism affects perceived object sizes as the size of the virtual hand changes. In the experiment, we manipulate the level of realism (realistic, iconic, and abstract) and size (veridical and enlarged) of the virtual hand and measure the perceived size of a cube. The results show that the size of the cube is perceived to be smaller when the virtual hand is enlarged compared to when it is veridical, indicating that the participants perceive the sizes of objects based on the size of the avatar, only in the case of a highly realistic hand. Our findings indicate that the more realistic the avatar, the stronger is the sense of embodiment including body ownership, which fosters scaling the size of objects using the size of the body as a fundamental metric. This provides evidence that self-avatar appearances affect how we perceive not only virtual bodies but also virtual spaces.

Along with deficits in spatial cognition, a decline in body-related information is observed in aging and is thought to contribute to impairments in navigation, memory, and space perception. According to the embodied cognition theories, bodily and environmental information play a crucial role in defining cognitive representations. Thanks to the possibility to involve body-related information, manipulate environmental stimuli, and add multisensory cues, virtual reality is one of the best candidates for spatial memory rehabilitation in aging for its embodied potential. However, current virtual neurorehabilitation solutions for aging and neurodegenerative diseases are in their infancy. Here, we discuss three concepts that could be used to improve embodied representations of the space with virtual reality. The virtual bodily representation is the combination of idiothetic information involved during virtual navigation thanks to input/output devices; the spatial affordances are environmental or symbolic elements used by the individual to act in the virtual environment; finally, the virtual enactment effect is the enhancement on spatial memory provided by actively (cognitively and/or bodily) interacting with the virtual space and its elements. Theoretical and empirical findings will be presented to propose innovative rehabilitative solutions in aging for spatial memory and navigation.

No abstract

Abstract This paper discusses the original artistic intentions behind the immersive virtual environment OSMOSE (1995). The strategies employed to manifest them include the use of an embodying user interface of breath and balance and a visual aesthetic based on transparency and spatial ambiguity. The paper examines the medium of immersive virtual space as a spatio‐temporal arena in which mental constructs of the world can be given three‐dimensional form and be kinaesthetically explored through full‐body immersion and interaction. Throughout, comparisons are made between OSMOSE and conventional design approaches to virtual reality. The tendency of such approaches to reinforce the West's historic devaluation of nature and the body is also discussed. It is suggested that this medium can potentially be used to counteract such tendencies. In the case of OSMOSE, an experiential context is constructed in which culturally learned perceptual/conceptual boundaries are osmotically dissolved, causing conventional assumptions about interior, exterior, mind, body and nature to be questioned by the immersed participant.

Research in the field of mobile communication studies (MCS) has generally moved away from focusing on how mobile phones distract users from their physical environment to considering how the experience of space and place can be enhanced by locative smartphone applications. This article argues that trajectory may be complicated by the emergence of a new type of mobile technology: mobile virtual reality (MVR). While an increasing number of handsets are specifically developed with MVR in mind, there is little to no research that situates this phenomenon within the continuum of MCS. The intention of this paper is accordingly twofold. First, the article conceptualizes MVR as a connective tissue between the two sequential tropes of MCS: physical distraction and spatial enhancement. Second, the article introduces the concept of ‘dislocated space’ as a way of understanding the embodied space MVR might configure.

Abstract The development of digital communication technologies not only has an influence on human communicative practices, but also creates new spaces for human collaborative activity. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, computer games. Closely looking at interactions among a group of gamers, we examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk and plans for action. Introducing the notion of participation cues , we explain how interactants are able to orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms. (Computer-mediated communication, language and technology, gaming, gesture, participation, multimodality)*