001. Immersion in Virtual Reality

Transcript:

When you're first starting out designing virtual reality learning experiences, the top two words you'll hear are presence and immersion. Now, understanding these two concepts is really essential because arguably, the reason to do things in virtual reality and choosing this modality is to facilitate this feeling of presence and immersion for the user.

Now, in my experience, the term immersion is used a ton of different ways in the industry. Sometimes levels of immersion would be described as the VR display system being used for the experience. So you know, non-immersive VR, semi-immersive VR, or fully immersive VR. Another way immersion is often used is to describe the feeling or psychological response of a user or a learner.

I quickly realized that oftentimes when folks would use the term immersion, they weren't always referring to the same thing. And there's also a really good reason as to why this even occurs, and it's because even in the scientific literature, immersion is defined in a variety of different ways. In a 2003 article, Slater described immersion as a description of a technology, whereas a 2007 paper by Bowman and McMahon referred to immersion as the objective level of sensory fidelity imparted by a VR system.

And the more I dug into it, the more I discovered that there are different categories of immersion. So I thought I'd cover them. Video so that the next time you find yourself in conversation and the term immersion comes up, you have an informed sense of what they may mean when they're referring to the term immersion.

In 2016, Nilson, Nordal, and Serafin of the University of Denmark did a review of existing literature and definitions of immersion, and they found that there was a general consensus that immersion involved being or feeling surrounded by something. They created a three-dimensional taxonomy for the various categories of immersion.

The three dimensions that they defined are system immersion, which refers to immersion as a property of the system, narrative immersion, which refers to the subjective response of the narrative or storyline. And then challenge-based immersion, which refers to the subjective response to challenges. System immersion refers to the objective level of sensory fidelity imparted by a VR system.

It's how the VR system influences the perceptual sensation of immersion. System immersion refers to the technology used to present the content rather than the content itself. So it's an objectively measurable property of the system that can be influenced by things like the environment or the interactions or the interfaces of the system.

Narrative immersion has to do with being deeply engaged in the storyline or content or activity that's being done within the environment and the compelling storyline that one is experiencing. This type of immersion is typically characterized by a really intense focus on the story or the plot, or the unfolding of events and the plot structure, and being extremely enticed and invested in it.

Now challenge-based immersion has to do with an extremely intense focus on the challenge that's presented to the learner. Users are deeply engaged and focused on overcoming challenges and trying to solve these problems that they're extremely immersed in. This type of immersion is really motivating because users are really enticed with overcoming challenges and confrontations and problem-solving and using strategic decision-making.

Challenge-based immersion is similar to concepts like flow theory or lev Vygotsky's, Zone of Proximal Development where either motivation or the flow state are achieved through a balance of challenge and skill level. And that's sort of where I see parallels between challenge-based immersion and some of these other concepts that we use when relating to learning design.

Now, each of these three dimensions, I feel plays a key role in how we might approach designing learning experiences in VR. We wanna think about how the system can facilitate immersion, how the context or the storyline we're trying to immerse learners in a. Are facilitating that sense of immersion for them, and then also that challenge-based type of immersion.

It makes us think about how we are structuring or sequencing and providing scaffolds within our virtual reality learning experiences to then facilitate an increased level of immersion for learners. So we can really think about how we might apply our knowledge of these three dimensions of immersion to then help us design and create really, truly immersive, engaging learning experiences.

Immersion is what makes any virtual reality experience feel real or believable, which is really what we're trying to achieve when we're designing learning experiences for VR. After all, if a learning experience doesn't seem real or believable, it might as well not take place in virtual reality, and ultimately it won't be an effective tool for learning.

I hope this video is helpful for you. In my next video, I'm going to be discussing the other key term you'll hear when you are designing for virtual reality, which is presence. Please hit that bell if you wanna be notified when that video comes out, and be sure to like and subscribe. I'm gonna be doing more of these videos in hopes to make VR and XR research more accessible and digestible for everyone.

So stay tuned and thanks for watching.