Embodiment in Virtual Reality
The body is our general medium for having a world.
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
Looking at a painting or a photograph, feeling absorbed in the objects and the world it represents, we forget where we are at the moment. This is the typical experience we have before a pictorial, two-dimensional interface. Extending this interface to a movable one like animations or motion pictures, we can then accustom ourselves to more spatial details of the diegetic world. Cinematic techniques allow us to achieve so: cuttings of different angled shots expose more fractions of the environment around the characters; long takes with camera movement present space as a material continuum where actuality is to be perceived. The latter, in particular, gives rise to our awareness as the spectator. Our bodily feelings are aroused in a certain way depending on how the camera approaches the character. A low angle shot depicting a character dashing through the crowd, simply delivers a different sensation from a high angle shot capturing the same event. Indeed, great filmmakers knew the embodied nature of the visual medium long before virtual reality came into being — that behind the vision there are eyes, and behind the eyes there is a body.
The full realization of such embodied quality further requires the experienced agency by the spectator. Through not only seeing and feeling the scene, but also reacting and responding to the scene, the viewing subject achieves his or her agency. This is how virtual reality differs from immersive movies. If we compare watching Gravity (2013) in 3D form and the Spacewalker (2017) on a VR platform, it’s not hard to find that the latter grants us more agency, since in it we can look around, let our sights linger on our favorite parts of the planet surface and therefore explore the spatial environment more freely. The connection between the motor inputs and perceptual outputs define this agency. It puts our perceptuomotor interface onto the front stage of interactions and opens up many aesthetic possibilities. As Mark Hansen points out, this embodied interface is our natural interface, which puts us in touch with “our most primitive perceptual capacities”, extending man’s place in play and action (p.3).
Apart from the sense of agency in interaction, the sense of embodiment also encompasses a sense of self-location and a sense of body ownership (Slater et al.). These two aspects distinguish VR from other interactive media such as video games. Self-location means the belief that one’s self is located within the perceived body, while body ownership means that one regards the perceived body or body parts as his or her own. In virtual reality artworks, multiple techniques can enhance this sense of embodiment for the viewer, to lead to the identification of the viewer's biological body and the perceived avatar body. For instance, the first-person perspective with regard to the eyes of the virtual body (seen as conjunctive to the perspective), is used to create a sense of self-location. Also, to increase the sensory correlations between physical stimulations of the biological body and the seen stimulation on the avatar’s body can somehow enhance the feeling of body-ownership.
Commonly for VR videos, because of the difficulty in kinetic tracking of bodily movements and manipulation of biological somatosensory inputs, the “look-around” option becomes the major means to activate the perceptuomotor interface and generate the sense of self-location in viewers. Besides, there is often the need to add in some contextual information, in order to remind the viewer of his/her role as an embodied character beyond the pure perceiver in the diegetic world.
For example, the VR artwork 6x9 (2016) only utilizes the look-around option and contextual information to bring the viewer into the avatar prisoner’s body. Without a sense of embodiment, the experience would make no sense for us. As the auditory information tells us about the prisoner’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts, we begin to interpret the visual information with the thought of confinement. The perceptual gestures, such as looking at the ceiling and turning around relentlessly, thus have psychological implications, signifying the prisoners’ sense of boredom and despair. The camera position also becomes a measurement of the prisoner’s insanity. Once the camera gets very close to the ceiling, we feel there is a loss of weight of reality. The video shows that the employment of a sense of embodiment can generate psychological effects that are more visceral and profound, with one possibility that such embodiment becomes the source of confinement for its realistic quality.
Furthermore, by evoking a sense of embodiment in the virtual space, one can overcome the habitual perception mode and renovate his/her mental state. French philosopher Merleau-Ponty suggests that the precondition of our perception lies in the body’s preconscious kinship with its natural surroundings. The body is “the third genre between the subject and the object” (p.407), which implies that embodiment precedes our objectification of the world and subjectification of the self.
Char Davies’ interactive artwork Osmose (1995), for example, constructs an interactive abstract space to activate our innate body medium. The vision changes according to participators’ breaths and bodily movements, allowing them to have a nuanced sense of body ownership. The scuba-diving scenario is not sufficient to explain the kind of transcendent and euphoric feelings the participators are likely to experience through interacting. Davies’ technique is to let the familiar objects become unusual, so that man can retreat from habitual ways of perception and enter the mystic realm of the unknown (Davies). Participators are allowed to reencounter the world in a primitive way, suspending their systematic knowledge about the names and positions of things. What remains is an authentic feeling of the living body in the virtual space.
This also speaks to Heidegger’s critique of the instrumentalization of the world in technology. For Heidegger, the original meaning of technology, which lies not in “challenging” but in “revealing” the presence, has been lost in the process of technological development (p.17). Fortunately, Osmose employs technology to achieve its initial aim, bringing alive the “being-in-the-world” experience for participators.
Just as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger both imply, embodiment means a lot more than perceiving and interacting with things with a body. It actually concerns our basic feeling about our relationship with the world. In this sense, the combination of perceptuomotor interface and virtual space in virtual reality promises great prospects for tomorrow’s human aesthetic experience.
Works Cited
Davies, Char. 1998. “Changing Space: Virtuality as an Arena of Embodied Being.” In The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation and Crash Culture, by John Beckman, 144–51. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Hansen, Mark. 2006. Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Questions Concerning Technology”, In The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays, By Martin Heidegger, 17–27. New York: Harper and Row.
Mel Slater, Konstantina Kilteni, Raphaela Groten. 2012. “The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality.” Presence 373–387.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1958. Phenomenology of Perception. London and New York: Routledge.
