Virtual reality has existed for many years, dating back to the 1940s but becoming popular on a larger scale in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It has been largely regarded as something of a plaything or hobby and, in general, as something that is on a lower echelon when compared to physical reality. In recent years, however, as our society becomes more interconnected via the Internet and as highly interactive web services, such as Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter, play a larger role in individualsʼ lives, a reexamination of the status of virtual reality becomes necessary. ! This study employs the work of a major twentieth century critic, Kenneth Burke, and from his conception of dramatism to demonstrate that 1) virtual reality, for many, is a significant reality that can often lead to the formation of meaningful relationships between individuals and 2) the significance of this reality is born out of users dramatizing their online experiences. Through heuristics and dramatistic analysis, I examine how the users of Facebook dramatize their actions and collectively contribute to the formation of a controlling narrative that can be seen across all of virtual reality. Further, the findings of this thesis provide a heuristic foundation for future research into virtual reality. / The problem -- Literature review -- Method -- The controlling drama of Facebook as a virtual reality -- Conclusions, limitations and heuristic propositions. / Department of Telecommunications

This thesis elaborates on existing definitions and descriptions of simulation to develop an extended, inter-disciplinary concept of simulation that serves as an orienting model for the interpretation of culture. As cultural theory, simulation offers insights into the stabilization and propagation of cultural forms. Used descriptively, the metaphor of simulation throws into definition a cultural pattern of progressive formalization through increasingly sophisticated methods of abstraction. I find evidence of the pattern at many levels of analysis; metaphysical, social and micro-social, particularly at the level of the body. I use the speculative notion of the digital refiguring of culture to articulate this tendency towards abstraction through a parallel with the enhanced analytic and representational capacities of digital technology. I consider several actual and hypothetical ways that the computer figures in this process. I argue that the basis for cultural form is shifting away from the referential function of the body, as the abstract realm of mediated relations takes on greater importance in modern culture.

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One of the most fundamental components of our daily lives is social interaction, ranging from simple activities, such as purchasing a donut in a bakery on the way to work, to complex ones, such as instructing a remote colleague how to repair a broken automobile. While we interact with others, various challenges may arise, such as miscommunication or physical interference. In a bakery, a clerk may misunderstand the donut at which a customer was pointing due to the uncertainty of their finger direction. In a repair task, a technician may remove the wrong bolt and accidentally hit another user while replacing broken parts due to unclear instructions and lack of attention while communicating with a remote advisor. This dissertation explores techniques for supporting multi-user 3D interaction in augmented reality in a way that addresses these challenges. Augmented Reality (AR) refers to interactively overlaying geometrically registered virtual media on the real world. In particular, we address how an AR system can use overlaid graphics to assist users in referencing local objects accurately and remote objects efficiently, and prevent co-located users from physically interfering with each other. My thesis is that our techniques can provide more accurate referencing for co-located and efficient referencing for remote users and lessen interference among users. First, we present and evaluate an AR referencing technique for shared environments that is designed to improve the accuracy with which one user (the indicator) can point out a real physical object to another user (the recipient). Our technique is intended for use in otherwise unmodeled environments in which objects in the environment, and the hand of the indicator, are interactively observed by a depth camera, and both users wear tracked see-through displays. This technique allows the indicator to bring a copy of a portion of the physical environment closer and indicate a selection in the copy. At the same time, the recipient gets to see the indicator's live interaction represented virtually in another copy that is brought closer to the recipient, and is also shown the mapping between their copy and the actual portion of the physical environment. A formal user study confirms that our technique performs significantly more accurately than comparison techniques in situations in which the participating users have sufficiently different views of the scene. Second, we extend the idea of using a copy (virtual replica) of physical object to help a remote expert assist a local user in performing a task in the local user's environment. We develop an approach that uses Virtual Reality (VR) or AR for the remote expert, and AR for the local user. It allows the expert to create and manipulate virtual replicas of physical objects in the local environment to refer to parts of those physical objects and to indicate actions on them. The expert demonstrates actions in 3D by manipulating virtual replicas, supported by constraints and annotations. We performed a user study of a 6DOF alignment task, a key operation in many physical task domains. We compared our approach with another 3D approach that also uses virtual replicas, in which the remote expert identifies corresponding pairs of points to align on a pair of objects, and a 2D approach in which the expert uses a 2D tablet-based drawing system similar to sketching systems developed for prior work by others on remote assistance. The study shows the 3D demonstration approach to be faster than the others. Third, we present an interference avoidance technique (Redirected Motion) intended to lessen the chance of physical interference among users with tracked hand-held displays, while minimizing their awareness that the technique is being applied. This interaction technique warps virtual space by shifting the virtual location of a user's hand-held display. We conducted a formal user study to evaluate Redirected Motion against other approaches that either modify what a user sees or hears, or restrict the interaction capabilities users have. Our study was performed using a game we developed, in which two players moved their hand-held displays rapidly in the space around a shared gameboard. Our analysis showed that Redirected Motion effectively and imperceptibly kept players further apart physically than the other techniques. These interaction techniques were implemented using an extensible programming framework we developed for supporting a broad range of multi-user immersive AR applications. This framework, Goblin XNA, integrates a 3D scene graph with support for 6DOF tracking, rigid body physics simulation, networking, shaders, particle systems, and 2D user interface primitives. In summary, we showed that our referencing approaches can enhance multi-user AR by improving accuracy for co-located users and increasing efficiency for remote users. In addition, we demonstrated that our interference-avoidance approach can lessen the chance of unwanted physical interference between co-located users, without their being aware of its use.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Richard Catrambone; Committee Member: Gregory Corso; Committee Member: Jack Feldman; Committee Member: John T. Stasko; Committee Member: Wendy A. Rogers. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Whether virtual reality will have positive or negative implications on the social structure is debatable, but one thing is certain- virtual reality will play an increasingly important role in public and private life as we move toward the future (1). Over the years there has been a notable increase in the amount of people playing online virtual reality games. World of Warcraft (WoW) alone has an estimated eight million account holders, making it the largest Massive Multi-player Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) in the world. Although the Internet has been appropriated by social practice, it does have specific affects on the social practice itself. Role-playing and identity building form the basis of online interaction (Castells, 2001:118), which suggests that social patterns of communication are starting to change. This study starts with the basic explanation of the Internet and Globalization which lends a hand to those wanting to escape into parallel online worlds, where they are able to reinvent themselves. This will lead into a discussion on how virtual reality online gaming can aid in the erosion of social communication as well as enhance it, through communities, the identity, and addiction. Theorists such as Rheingold (1994), Turkle (1998), Robins (1998) and Yee (2006) discuss how virtual reality gaming provides a window to a different world, where players can experiment with their identities as well as interact with people from around the world; all of which aid in the shift of normal social patterns and self construction. Finally a close look is taken on why these virtual reality online games hold such an allure to its players, turning them into gaming addicts, or is it an online communication addiction. During this dissertation a preliminary case study was under taken with a collected group of the Durban youth, regarding WoW and their online interactions with people abroad. It is evident that further research needs to be conducted in order to fully understand the extent of virtual reality online games and their effect on social behaviours and communication patterns. As a transformation in the relationship between the self and the social outside worlds, tends to blur when gamers enter into their fantasy society. (1) www.bilawchuk.com / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

In the age of computing, we rely on software to manage our days, from the moment we wake up until we go to sleep. Software predicts the future based on actualized data from the past. It produces procedures instead of experiences and solutions instead of care. Software systems tend to perpetuate a normalized state of equilibrium. Their application in social media, predictive policing, and social profiling is increasingly erasing diversity in culture and identity. Our immediate reality is narrowing towards cultural conventions shared among the powerful few, whose voices directly influence contemporary digital culture. On the other hand, computational collective intelligence can sometimes generate emergent forces to counter this tendency and force software systems to open up. Historically, artists from different artistic moments have adopted collaborative making to redefine the boundary of creative expression. Video Gaming, especially open-world simulation games, is rapidly being adopted as an emerging form of communication, expression, and self-organization. How can gaming conventions such as Narrative Emergence, Hacking, and Modding help us understand collective play as countering forces against the systematic tendency of normalization? How can people from diverse backgrounds come together to contemplate, make, and simulate rules and conditions for an alternative virtual world? What does it mean to design and virtually inhabit a world where rules are rewritten continuously by everyone, and no one is in control?

A framework for understanding the social responses to virtual humans suggests that human-like characteristics (e.g., facial expressions, voice, expression of emotion) act as cues that lead a person to place the agent into the category "human" and thus, elicit social responses. Given this framework, this research was designed to answer two outstanding questions that had been raised in the research community (Moon&Nass, 2000): 1) If a virtual human has more human-like characteristics, will it elicit stronger social responses from people? 2) How do the human-like characteristics interact in terms of the strength of social responses? Two social psychological (social facilitation and politeness norm) experiments were conducted to answer these questions. The first experiment investigated whether virtual humans can evoke a social facilitation response and how strong that response is when participants are given different cognitive tasks (e.g., anagrams, mazes, modular arithmetic) that vary in difficulty. They did the tasks alone, in the company of another person, or in the company of a virtual human that varied in terms of features. The second experiment investigated whether people apply politeness norms to virtual humans. Participants were tutored and quizzed either by a virtual human tutor that varied in terms of features or a human tutor. Participants then evaluated the tutor's performance either directly by the tutor or indirectly via a paper and pencil questionnaire. Results indicate that virtual humans can produce social facilitation not only with facial appearance but also with voice recordings. In addition, performance in the presence of voice synced facial appearance seems to elicit stronger social facilitation (i.e., no statistical difference compared to performance in the human presence condition) than in the presence of voice only or face only. Similar findings were observed with the politeness norm experiment. Participants who evaluated their tutor directly reported the tutor's performance more favorably than participants who evaluated their tutor indirectly. In addition, this valence toward the voice synced facial appearance had no statistical difference compared to the valence toward the human tutor condition. The results suggest that designers of virtual humans should be mindful about the social nature of virtual humans.

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it aimed to present and understand the experiences of online gamers from the paradigm of positive psychology. To achieve this, the phenomenon of flow was investigated to see whether or not, it is experienced whilst gaming online and if present, how it is revealed in this context. The second purpose was to contribute to theory building and to respond to extant research recommendations. Aligned with a qualitative orientation, the method selected to achieve the objectives of the study was interpretative phenomenological analysis. A sample of four participants who met the criteria for inclusion in the research were selected and interviewed using semi-structured interviews. Data was analysed and interpreted inductively and categorised into superordinate themes. These were presented as two sections: Section A explored the experience and meaning of online gaming through the following three superordinate themes; intention, pre-gaming rituals and gaming process. Section B discussed the social experience and meaning of gaming online through the superordinate theme, a gamers way. This study both challenged and supported theory and research in the field and introduced novel areas, such as pregaming rituals and the subthemes; marijuana and gaming space. This is a notable and promising "side effect" of a research design that is exploratory. Findings called for future multi-disciplinary research into flow, gaming and online relationships considering Csikszentimaihalyi‟s concept of autotelic relationships and Heideggers‟ philosophical framework.

Technological advances will allow virtual agents to increasingly help individuals with daily activities. As such, virtual agents will interact with users of various ages and experience levels. Facial expressions are often used to facilitate social interaction between agents and humans. However, older and younger adults do not label human or virtual agent facial expressions in the same way, with older adults commonly mislabeling certain expressions. The dynamic formation of facial expression, or motion, may provide additional facial information potentially making emotions less ambiguous. This study examined how motion affects younger and older adults in recognizing various intensities of emotion displayed by a virtual agent. Contrary to the dynamic advantage found in emotion recognition for human faces, older adults had higher emotion recognition for static virtual agent faces than dynamic ones. Motion condition did not influence younger adults' emotion recognition. Younger adults had higher emotion recognition than older adults for the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. Low intensities of expression had lower emotion recognition than medium to high expression intensities.