https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9608-3845
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ABSTRACT
This essay explores the layering of perceptual information across the real and the virtual that occurs when bodies cohabit virtual environments using new commodity-priced virtual reality technologies. Specifically, we take an embodied somatic and dance perspective to better understand and characterise the perceptual gaps between how bodies are seen and how they are felt in virtual environments. Our discussion derives from observations and analysis of participant feedback obtained from a series of workshops run in July 2018 using a new multi-person VR framework. This research has opened up a fascinating fundamental question: can we harness VR's potential to awaken new modes of perception that enable people to better know their body?
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Mike O’Connor, Balazs Hornung, Alex Jones, Simon Jones, and Kate Elswit, all of whom supported this work along the way (at the Barbican, the Arnolfini, and also during Bodily Undoing).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Lisa May Thomas (LMT) is an award-winning contemporary dance artist and film-maker trained at Laban. Her screen-dance work has been presented at film festivals globally, on digital TV channels (BBC, Channel 4, ABC), and in community and education sectors (The Elders, Tea Time, The Touch Diaries). LMT has worked extensively with digital technologies in performance, including multi-award-winning sci-art-tech collaboration danceroom Spectroscopy digital performance Hidden Fields and her own research project Dances with Avatars. LMT is a resident at Bristol's Pervasive Media Studio, PhD candidate at the University of Bristol (joint between performance and computer science), and member of Glowacki research group.
David R. Glowacki (DRG) is a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, a Philip Leverhulme fellow, and visiting scholar at Stanford University. In addition to publishing widely across a range of scientific and artistic disciplines, he also works as an artist. His multi-award-winning artworks, which combine digital aesthetics with state-of-the-art interactive computing, have been experienced by over 200,000 people across three continents. In Bristol, DRG leads a cross-disciplinary academic research group whose members have expertise spanning molecular physics, computer science, human–computer interaction, virtual reality, digital audio processing, performance, and contemporary dance. DRG is a resident at Bristol's Pervasive Media Studio & co-founder of interactive Scientific Ltd.
ORCID
David R. Glowacki http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9608-3845
Notes
2 Virtual Reality technologies aid a person to explore and interact with a computer-generated environment. Using these technologies, typically a headset or head-mounted display (HMD) is worn and controllers are held in the hands, the person becomes part of this virtual world or is immersed within this environment and is able to manipulate objects and/or perform a series of actions within it.
3 The ‘splitting up’ of sensory phenomenon, into the seen and the felt, is a working hypothesis as to some extent it is a superficial distinction owing to the fact that the senses operate as an integrated and adaptable whole/system. However, it is necessary to make this split in order to break-down and problematize the complex issues around the sensory body in the virtual environment.
4 I will address where possible the people using the VR technologies as ‘participants’ but will occasionally refer to them as ‘users’. The latter is borrowed from the field of Human–Computer-Interaction (HCI) whilst the former is used more in performance contexts. See Bishop, C. Participation (Citation2006).
6 No specific information was disclosed about the nature of the VR technology/system in its function as a scientific tool, and the boundaries of the space and safety concerns were addressed - the main concern in terms of the technology and outlining the spatial boundaries was to make sure participants did not touch the lighthouse cameras at any point as this would create a disturbance with the technology.
7 Using the multi-person VR framework at this stage in its development, the user’s body was represented in the VE as a transparent rectangle which is mapped by the camera from the headset worn (see ). This meant that users could only see each other, not themselves visually in the VE. More generally, the ways in which the body of the user is represented in a virtual environment can range from having no avatar whatsoever, to a basic shape to much more complex human and nonhuman aesthetic forms.
8 See Braun, V. & Clarke V. Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology (Citation2006).
9 Vision can be certainly considered as the dominant sense in the Western body but see Montague, A. Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (Citation1986) for an anthropological analysis of the Aivilik Eskimo tribe who train tactile and aural as former sensory responses to vision.
10 Sound in the VE is an area that is currently being investigated by Alex Jones, an audio engineer who is a member of the Glowacki research group at the University of Bristol
11 Rubber Hand Illusion (e.g. see Botvinick and Cohen, Citation1998).
12 In their 2014 paper Development of Virtual Reality proprioceptive rehabilitation system for stroke patients, Cho (Citation2014) analyse how stroke patients perform reaching movements and (stroke-affected) hand positioning toward a target position in VR with and without visual cues. They present quantitative evidence suggesting that VR can actually improve stroke patients’ ability to improve proprioception lost during a stroke. They speculate that VR may offer “a new type of rehabilitation system” (Citation2014, 263) which “focuses on the proprioception of stroke patients” by “blocking visual feedback” (Citation2014, 263) “could be an effective means to enhance motor control during rehabilitation training” (Citation2014, 264).
13 see Machon, Sobchack, and Birringer on synaesthetic dance and performance practice.
14 Flocking is an ensemble movement improvisation practice which draws from the behaviour exhibited when a group of birds are foraging or in flight.
15 Contact Improvisation (CI) is an improvised dance form in which orients around a point of contact usually between two dancers, but sometimes more, for more on this see Novack, C. (Citation1990) Sharing the Dance.
16 Grau, O. writes in Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Citation2003), VR about “the idea of installing an observer in a hermetically closed-off image space of illusion.” (Also, one could mention The Skinner box here).
18 Participants were told to explore the virtual environment in this task, there was no mention of the grids or what the grids were for (as a safety mechanism to stop people walking into physical walls or objects they are not able to see in the virtual environment).
19 The notion of Kinesphere was created by Rudolf Laban to define: “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot” (Laban Citation1966, 10).
20 Also, see Abram, D. Becoming Animal (Citation2010).
21 Vivian Sobchack writes from a phenomenological perspective about her personal experience of prosthetics and how she “attends to the dynamics and mutability of the supposed ‘phantom’ limb of her prosthetic leg” (Citation2010, Sobchack, 1).
22 Scientific intuition is a thing, see https://doi.org/10.1080/0950069940160406.
23 There is a whole area of research evolving in the field of Human–Computer-Interaction called Somaesthetics which foregrounds the role of bodily or felt experience, see this paper as an example: http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2015/somaesthetic-design.