In order to experience the sense of touch the first thing you require is a body; maybe a hand; the edge of a finger; the outermost layer of skin. A number of attempts have been made to integrate embodiment into virtual theatre. These lay across a spectrum, from true presence to pure novelty, and the most basic tend to appear in 360° videos as a point of view camera. A body extends from the base of the equirectangular video, either applied in post-production or achieved with some mechanical trickery on set.
Although these humble methods do indicate a genuine eagerness for embodiment, they concentrate on the aesthetic and disregard the meaning. At the same time, technologists working with embodiment tools — such as 6 degrees of freedom controls — don’t consider it significant. This despite evidence that giving users a virtual body within a VR context is a “critical contributor to the sense of being in the virtual location” (Slater, Spanlang & Corominas, 2010).
Embodying The Senses
Let’s start by breaking down what is involved in embodiment. It’s about more than seeing a body that might be your own. It’s about a subset of senses including but not limited to; mechanoreception, the sense of touch; proprioception, the awareness of our position and movements; and interoception, the sense of the internal workings of our body. If one were to realistically simulate these three senses in a way that accurately represented the fictional situation entered into by the participant then you may actually surpass embodiment: in the sense that the participant is no longer embodying an experience but they are, for all intents and purposes, experiencing it. Seeing is believing, and so much more.
In XR we don’t need to pass that threshold, which is convenient as achieving even an approximation of this would involve intrusive neurostimulation: in other words sticking giant needles into each other’s brains. Hardly ideal, or ethical, but thankfully due to our innate sensory selective attention this is unnecessary. By approximating, or at the very least pacifying, these senses we can reach a state in which the participant feels what we want them to feel and ignores everything else. This could involve basic considerations of comfort: if a space is too cold or too hot in conflict with the content being presented then the participant will be distracted from the designed experience.
Can you feel it?
Conversely, creators can contextualize these sensory differences and use them to great effect. In their 2018 VR theatre piece ‘The Extension’, young theatre company Electrick Village replaced represented sensory stimuli in VR with dissimilar ones in reality. In VR we are fed a savory snack and in reality we are given a piece of chocolate. This contrast embodies the emotional state of the character, whose experience we are living in a visceral way.
Achieving embodiment through the alignment of our proprioception and the position of the virtual body is becoming more achievable thanks to technological advances in motion capture. All in one electromagnet suit-based systems are constantly improving in accuracy. The difference in price versus optical tracking is dramatic enough to forgive the drop in quality of output. We are also seeing software-based solutions to embodiment that reconstruct a full body based on the position of the 6DOF controllers and headset.
Virtual Limbs
This is most effective in the VR game Echo Arena. An anti-gravity game mechanic, which renders the player’s legs useless, gives us virtual legs that trail behind as we move through the environment with our hands. As there is no conflicting information between the control of our real and virtual legs, a few minutes in we simply ignore that sensory input.
Comparable work has been done in theatre to align sensory input with represented visual input that actually predates the modern wave of consumer VR. The company Il Pixel Rosso created a number of works — most notably ‘And the Birds Fell From the Sky’ — which employed video glasses, real world haptics and instruction based theatre to create virtual experiences. Participants were instructed to move in a way that aligned with the fixed frame camera movements shown to them on the video glasses. Despite this being a film media heavy product, the act of theatre was enacted in the live embodiment produced by the agents of the piece and experienced by the audience.
The participant has lived in their body their entire life; when you alter the representation of their body you ask them to relearn how it works. This is not an achievable task in the few minutes before they lose interest. You have two choices when it comes to embodiment: accurate representation or intentional subversion. Anywhere in-between will cause a disconnect that you may not be forgiven for.
Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Director and Producer Trajectory Theatre
(Originally published on Our Trajectory Medium on 13 February 2019)