Research frontiers in virtual reality

Abstract

The emergence of teleoperation and virtual environments has greatly increased interest in "synthetic experience", a mode of experience made possible by both these newer technologies and earlier ones, such as telecbrnmunicarion and sensory prosthetics. I maintain that understanding synthetic experience must begin by recognizing the fallacy of naive realism and with the recognition that the phenomenology of synthetic experience is conrinuous with that of ordinary experience. I demonstrate the continuity of synrhetic experience and normal perceptual experience with respect to two issues: the determination of' a person's phenomenal location in space and the experience of "being in touch with" near and remote objects. The emergence of teleoperation and virtual environments has greatly increased interest in "synthetic experience" [I], those forms of experience which are made possible both by these newer technologies and by earlier ones, such as telecommunication and sensory prosthetics. Recently, a number of authors have offered a variety of taxonomies and conceptual schemes for thinking about the experiential states associated with synthetic experience (e.g., presence. externalization) and the properties of the effectoridisplay arrangement that promote various degrees of perceptual realism [I, 2-91. Here I assert that an understanding of synthetic experience must begin by acknowledging that the phenomenology of synthetic experience is continuous with that of ordinary experience. In previous articles [6, 71, I have argued that in seeking to understand the phenomenology associated with the use of teleoperators and virtual environments, we must recognize the fallacy of naive realism. the unreflective view that the world we experience around us is one and the same as the "physical world." Vision, for example. is experienced as a transaction between observer and environment in which the eyes are mere windows on the physical world. This view fails to recognize that ordinary experience is mediate-that what we experience is an elaborate construction of o w senses and nervous system that is so highly functional a representation of the surrounding environment that we unsuspectingly act upon the former as if it were the latter. In its place, we need to substitute a form of representative realism that makes the distinction between the phenomenal world. that of which we are directly aware, and the physical world. that which underlies our phenomenal awareness but can only be known through inference. Among the facts that demand this alternate view is the mchromacy of human color vision-while color is part of the very fabric of the …