what are
virtual
gatherings?
Gatherings are an exchange of space, time, presence, knowledge. Taking away the physical aspect of gatherings, it becomes an abstract of that communication that gets split into levels of privacy and transparency. Your participation and presence is recorded in the internet.
what are
virtual gatherings like?
This chapter will discuss the human experience in virtual gathering spaces. In the digital frontier, distant crowds will formulate and operate in novel ways granting users a new universe of interactions and possibilities. As this chapter seeks to answer some of the questions about ‘what are they like?’ it will touch on points across the vast landscapes of human cognition, representation and interaction in virtual gathering spaces.
Who are you?
Modes of Representation
avatar
profile
character
The Avatar : A digital representation of self is a figure or model representing a person in a digital environment
The Profile : A digital representation of self that can range from a static representation of the avatar plus customized content
The Character: A digital representation of self that has a predetermined background and storyline. The persona of this entity means its modes of action and interaction can be prescribed if it exists within the environment that contains and defines it
Identification : the act of indicating a person or thing's identity
Authentication : the process of verifying that identity
Various models of user tracking are deployed strategically across different platforms based on the needs of the user, and of the platform itself.
Tracking Models
The accumulation of authenticated user attributes is of paramount importance to platforms that subsist on an ad-based revenue model. This accumulation happens so proprietary behavioral surplus can be packaged into behavioral models and sold to third parties for the purpose of advertising products and ideas. This means that who we are on these platforms is constantly monitored and our experiences commodified.
Virtual Reflections
The modes through which virtual gathering spaces allow us to express self may have a profound impact on how we think about who we are. The ‘Proteus Effect, namely, that when one wears an avatar, he implicitly becomes like that avatar’ has been widely studied by researchers to better understand the ‘psychological mechanisms of how avatars changed the people that wore them.’ This line of inquiry demands continued pursuit as we look into the collection of virtual mirrors across platforms and a different version of self gazes back at us from every frame.
-Experience on Demand
It is a fair question to ask who we can be in virtual spaces, but perhaps a more fundamental question is to ask who we will become based on the principles that shape our virtual experiences?
A user looks at the gallery of 'selves'
How do you feel?
Synchrony | Asynchrony - Now and Then
Synchrony is the condition of simultaneous action, development, or occurrence and in the context of virtual gathering spaces it has far reaching implications on how an interaction or space may feel to the user. The most illustrative mechanism to describe the concept of synchrony is its application to communication functionality on virtual platforms.
There are three necessary agents for communication on virtual platforms:
Creator of the transmission
Platform
Interpretor of the transmission
Synchrony
When all three of these agents act simultaneously then the communication is synchronous like the real time video feed in a Zoom call.
Synchrony makes the experience highly engaging on Miro
Asynchrony
When these three agents act serially but not simultaneously then the communication is asynchronous like in text messaging.
Impression Management
Synchronicity can allow users to feel a more powerful sense of presence (the illusion of non mediation) when coupled with multimodal communication channels that can transmit different conversational signals from one user to another. For example, synchronous visual and audio channels support the transmission of body language (through intonation/ cadence of speech and body position) in real time which is key to impression management. The momentary negotiation of self in response to the environment is a fundamental aspect of human interaction that can protect an individual from overexposure to an apathetic audience or support the exchange of complex information across bonds of social capital developed through a history of meaningful interactions.
Greek theatre mask refer to the range of emotions presented by stage actors
Synchrony is valuable as it relates to impression management in scenarios where a user can interpret the signals transmitted by others in the group, capping its value to a small group size, otherwise the amount of information would be overwhelming and impossible to process.
Communication Diversity
Many platforms offer the duality of synchronous and asynchronous communication to support a broad range of social and content exchanges. By offering the user varied forms of communication that range in demands on processing power (both human and computer) compelling experiences of togetherness can be built in virtual gathering spaces.
By granting the user agency in the form of communication they engage with, virtual platforms can foster inclusivity and greater exchange between individuals through space and time.
Subjective Experience
The Visual Field and the Visual World
Subjectivite experience is based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions and refers to the emotional and cognitive impact of a human experience. The visual field (retinal image) is the set of visual data that the user must then interpret through the guide of his / her own experiences to produce the visual world (what he/she understands about what he/she sees).
Subjective experiences are created by the individual mind, therefore users in the same environment can individually have dramatically different subjective experiences due to diverse backgrounds.
‘A keystone in the arch of human understanding is the recognition that man at certain critical points synthesizes experience. Another way of stating this is that man learns while he sees and what he learns influences what he sees.’
--The Hidden Dimension
Creating the Subjectivity Model of the User
A strategy commonly deployed by virtual platforms like Facebook is to seek understanding of a user’s subjectivities in order to create a model by which the platform can align the visual field to the visual world. This model of subjectivity is built through the explicit expression of the user for example liking a post, and the observed actions taken by a user for example buying a type of product.
Double tag - liking a post
buying product from advertisement
Deploying the Subjectivity Model
By sorting users into categories based on pre-demonstrated preferences, the user is likely to feel more comfortable and engaged because their world reflects their world view in both content and like minded users. This strategy however has the drawback of creating echo chambers, where only like minded users are made aware of each other to the ends of eliminating difference and stoking extremism. When the desire to belong supersedes discourse users can become complicit in the lack of peer moderation that can lead to toxicity.
categorizing users based on subjectivity models
Virtual gathering spaces have the potential to usher in an age of unprecedented global empathy through perspective taking. Through presence in virtual environments a user has the ability to expand the model of subjectivity by which a user frames understanding of the world. By inhabiting difference in virtual space it is altogether possible that we expand our idea of self to include others.
Perceptual Experience
‘... we can never be aware of the world as such, but only of… the impingement of physical forces on the sensory receptors.’
--F. P. Kilpatrick Explorations in Transactional Psychology
Sensory Receptors
Perceptual experience is formed by the activation of sensory receptors by physical forces. The distance receptors (sight and hearing) are the most developed senses in the human body so their resolution and expression in virtual spaces is highly influential in a user's perceptual experience. The technologies used to extend bodily senses expand the enclosure of the self ‘beyond the constraint of the anatomical limits of joint excursion’. The ability for the human mind’s representation of the body to encompass tools and handheld devices suggests that designers must in equal measure continue to interrogate the complexities of human perception and create devices with performance capabilities that match.
Constructing Experience
In the attempt to construct multi-sensorial virtual experiences it becomes apparent that the amount of processing required by the human mind and body to create ‘experience’ is extensive. Due to the processing demands to create compelling holistic experiences, several platforms target individual sensorial channels for high resolution in exchange for lower resolution in others.
High Fidelity for example is an ‘online audio space for groups and crowds’ that employs sophisticated spatial audio to get the convincing feeling of the presence of others while reducing the resolution of the environment and avatar to 2D.
Other platforms like Sansar focus on high resolution graphics where the environment and avatars are sophisticated but sacrifice spatial audio, and the ability for other interactions to happen between users.
Fundamentally, the goal of these platforms is to create presence through the activation of either of the distance receptors to produce a compelling sense of togetherness through various sensorial channels.
Extended Reality
Future iterations of virtual gathering spaces will likely seek to leverage the maximum fidelity and quantity of sensorial channels that are not only discrete to virtual environments but overlaid with physical ones as these worlds converge in extended reality.
Venn Diagram
Proprioception
‘His perception of space is dynamic because it is related to action - what can be done in a given space - rather than what is seen by passive viewing.’
--p.115 Hidden Dimension
Degrees of Freedom
Proprioception, also referred to as kinaesthesia, is the sense of self-movement and body position. In virtual space the Degrees of Freedom (the number of basic ways a rigid object can move through 3D space) has direct influence on what level of proprioception is possible, and how this allows the user to understand and interact with the environment.
Haptics
Whether an environment can provide compelling haptic feedback relies on adequate degrees of freedom in order to transact the bidirectional action of exploration through touch and proprioception. Giving the user an environment to explore through the immediate receptor of touch grants the user control of a more sensory system that is primitive in terms of bandwidth yet has profound impact on the connection made between individuals as it is the first sensory system to develop.
Investigating the Edge
Proxemics of Space
‘Embodied cognition argues that, while of course the mind is located in the brain, there are other organs in the body that influence cognition. Muscle movements and other sensory experiences help us understand the world around us. When we think, the parts of the brain that are associated with body movements become activated.’
-Experience on Demand
Body movement is a choreography that individuals use to communicate and to explore the environments they encounter that consist of other individuals and objects. We use our bodies to learn and to demonstrate who we are. The awareness and control of body position in space in relation to the circumstances we encounter allows an individual to take part in the elaborate cultural exchange that Edward T Hall termed the Proxemics of Space.
Where do you belong?
What can you do?
Frameworks and User Participation
World building and the exploring user built worlds are some of the most novel and exciting experiences for participants in distant virtual crowds. The framework established on these platforms has a direct relationship to the encouraged forms of participation. These worlds can be constructed of content like the knowledge production and sharing environment Wikipedia or constructed on beautiful spatial experiences where a user can really feel the presence of others like Sansar.
People accumulating in Sansar from different physical environments
People all over the world reading Wikipedia page
Models of Authorship
The modifiability of the world by the users, not just the creator of the world, illustrates the value proposition of the platform itself. It can be a centralized model of authorship and moderation, or it can be collaboratively built as a distributed network of authorship and participation.
Recapitulating the idea of sender, mediator, and receiver and applying it to the model of authorship shows the breakdown of power between agents across platforms
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Authorship Model - Sansar
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Authorship Model - Wikipedia
Windows and Doors
The current state of the immersive internet is that virtual gathering spaces remain discrete entities that can provide windows but not doors to one another. On both ends of the immersion spectrum from Wikipedia to Sansar there exists myriad hyperlinks to new spaces within the platform itself but not beyond. The future of the immersive internet will likely see these windows become doors of passage from one platform to the next which must grant the users self-sovereign identity, a model of the users’ data that they can take as a set of secured virtual belongings between platforms.
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hyperlinks in Wikipedia
Portal to worlds in Sansar
'both man and his environment participate in molding each other. Man is now in the position of actually creating the total world in which he lives, what ethologists refer to as his biotope. In creating this world he is actually determining what kind of an organism he will be.'
-The Hidden Dimension
Virtual gathering spaces demand multi-disciplinary investigation in regards to both user experience and the infrastructure for developing these experiences across platforms. As we witness increased participation of distant crowds where virtual realities can be generated in an unprecedented time scale and have instant widespread deployment, the questions of who we can be, and how we feel, become secondary to the question of who we will become through the ideologies that shape this participation.