HCI 530 : Seminar (HCI) Damian Schofield

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

TED Talk (Sixth Sense) Sixth Sense Technology

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

Final Fantasy Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

Final Fantasy So why do we build : Games ? Virtual Worlds ? Immersive Environments ?

Final Fantasy What is Immersion ?

Immersion What is Immersion ? Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment; often artificial. This mental state is frequently accompanied by spatial excess, intense focus, a distorted sense of time, and effortless action. The term is widely used to describe immersive virtual reality, installation art and video games, but it is not clear if people are using the same word consistently.

Immersion What is Immersion ? The sensation of total immersion in virtual reality (VR) can be so described: "You lose your critical distance to the experience and get emotionally involved. It could be not only a game you are a part of, but any kind of experience.... You feel as if it is very real but know it is not."

Immersion Immersion in History

Immersion Immersion in History

Immersion Quotes “A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us... The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. We refer to this experience as immersion. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus…” As quoted by Alison McMahan in her essay Immersion Engagement and Presence: A method for Analysing 3-D Video Gamesin the book The Game Theory Readered. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron

Immersion Quotes “Immersion is mentally absorbing and a process, a change, a passage from one mental state to another. It is characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening. ”Virtual Art: from Illusion to Immersion-Oliver Grau “The quality of apparently being present in images is achieved though [the] maximization of realism…” Virtual Art: from Illusion to Immersion-Oliver Grau “…a suspension of disbelief, a state in which the player’s mind forgets that it is being subjected to entertainment and instead accepts what it perceived as reality.” Game Design Perspectives–François Dominic Laramée

Immersion Quotes “I am a video game addict and it is not because of the certain number of hours I have spent playing or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level, it is because I have had life altering experiences in virtual space”

Immersion According to Ernest Adams, author and consulter on game design, immersion has three main categories: Tactical immersion Tactical immersion is experienced when performing tactile operations that involve skill. Players feel "in the zone" while perfecting actions that result in success. Strategic immersion Strategic immersion is more cerebral, and is associated with mental challenge. Chess players experience strategic immersion when choosing a correct solution among a broad array of possibilities. Narrative immersion Narrative immersion occurs when players become invested in a story, and is similar to what is experienced while reading a book or watching a movie.

Immersion S. Björk and J. Holopainen, in Patterns in Game Design, divide immersion into similar categories, but call them : Sensory-motoric immersion, Cognitive immersion and Emotional immersion, respectively. In addition to these, they add three new categories: Spatial immersion Spatial immersion occurs when a player feels the simulated world is perceptually convincing. The player feels that he or she is really "there" and that a simulated world looks and feels "real". Psychological immersion Psychological immersion occurs when a player confuses the game with real life. Sensory immersion The experience of entering into the three-dimensional environment, and being intellectually stimulated by it. The player experiences a unity of time and space as the player fuses with the image medium, which affects impression and awareness.

Slide Copyright Anna TitoAnna Tito

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Slide Copyright Anna TitoAnna Tito

Slide Copyright Anna TitoAnna Tito

Slide Copyright Anna TitoAnna Tito

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

Police Shooting of a Civilian Stoke-on-Trent, UK Crime Scene

Police Shooting of a Civilian Stoke-on-Trent, UK Crime Scene

Police Shooting of a Civilian Stoke-on-Trent, UK Crime Scene

A sophisticated level of realism, containing a high level of detail is often necessary since modern audiences have high levels of graphical literacy. Crime Scene

Combining abstract and realistic representations to enforce a message can be effective, however, testing must be undertaken to ensure that the audience are getting the correct message. Abstract Representation

So what is your favourite computer game and why ? Computer Games

Perhaps a thought tool can be of assistance. The comics creator and analyst Scott McCloud devised an extremely useful one, named the picture plane, for describing visual representations. Though applied explicitly to comics in his book "Understanding Comics", as he explains it "represents the total pictorial vocabulary of comics or of any of the visual arts". A game related equivalent is shown below: Scott McCloud

While developers and publishers race to cram themselves into the bottom left corner of Scott's plane, and are squeezed dry of all the resultant ugly hype, some will continue to work in the largely unexplored territories of visual representation. It's those implementations we need to push game aesthetics outward. Scott McCloud

Realism - Movies

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

Uncanny Valley The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.

Uncanny Valley

It is possible to become accustomed to the look and feel of the animated planet, but every time the film switches between the live-action world and the computer- generated one, it’s as though that kitchen door is swung open. We snap out of our blissful unawareness and are reminded that we aren’t really exploring the world of Pandora but really just watching a movie cleverly designed to make us give it our money. Realism - Movies

Another thing I find interesting with this “next-step” in film technology, as many critics refer to it, is that Avatar really expects viewers to understand and feel for the computer- generated characters as they would live actors. In historical Japan, performers mastered the art of bunraku, traditional Japanese puppet theater. The puppets moved in such a realistic fashion that viewers were supposed to be tricked into believing the puppets were alive. Such realism was not intended to be awe-inspiring but rather unsettling. Viewers were supposed to feel uneasy about believing the inanimate puppets to be living. Realism - Movies

I have a similar feeling about the computer-generated characters of Avatar. Not only can I not relate to them, but they creep me out to some extent. In fact, there is a scientific hypothesis regarding this very issue. The “uncanny valley” hypothesis states that close humanoid replicas cause a response of revulsion in human viewers. T here are a number of criticisms of this hypothesis, but I think it is something interesting for filmmakers to consider before plunging headfirst into GCI. Realism - Movies

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks

We need to begin to ask the questions:  Why do players play?  What makes a good game?  How can we make better games?  We start looking at developing better user interfaces and better game play as well as the standard immersive bells and whistles. We start asking ourselves why do we play? Concluding Remarks

You can have a great game with crap graphics but a crap game will always be a crap game no matter how pretty. Concluding Remarks

Assignment

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks Game Examples …

Realism - Crysis

Realism – Heavy Rain

HCI 530: Seminar (HCI) TED Talk Final Fantasy (The Spirits Within) Immersion Realism The Uncanny Valley Concluding Remarks So why do people really play games ?