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Contributions to Books:

J. Hoog:
"Real Virtuality - Immersion and Perception of Virtual Architecture in Multi-User Virtual Environments";
in: "New Realities: Being Syncretic", issued by: Ascott, Bast, Fiel, Jahrmann, Schnell; SpringerWienNewYork, Wien, 2009, ISBN: 978-3-211-78890-5, 140 - 143.



English abstract:
Technology that facilitates the creation of three dimensional virtual environments has become
extremely powerful and affordable within the last years. The booming computer game industry
consequently provides a wide spectrum of software environments with outputs that are complex, fully
accessible, and responsive Internet based 3D worlds, rendered in real time. The game industry has
made virtual reality a mass medium, and virtual spaces have become a major economical factor.
Players create and control avatars while mostly using common and simple interfaces as keyboard and
mouse. As a result of this, it is widely acknowledged that the virtual environments of the computer
games are capable to immerse their users in spite of the simple interfaces, and moreover reintroduce
space and place into the data streams. The typical first person or third person perspective of a game
environment might contribute to the constitution of human self-consciousness. Studies in the field of
psychology and neuroscience show that virtual 3D environments cause real physical and mental
human reactions. Virtual reality also has the potential to assist current rehabilitation techniques; e.g. to
cure acrophobia, arachnophobia or brain damage. (Vogeley 2004; Rizzo, et al. 1998; Kuntze, et
al.2003).
Virtual space is a hybrid medium, in which text, picture, and computational rules constantly interfere
with each other. Yet, their relationship seems to follow a specific setting - "the visual culture of a
computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of its material, and
computational (i.e., software driven) in its logic." (Hansen 2004).
The linkage of time and space - categories that Kant considered fundamental to human experience -
seems to be capable of creating a new conjunction between awareness and perception of space. The
user is not in the virtual space, but part of it, because - as Donald Jones states - virtual space "blurs
and fragments boundaries and senses of self and place." (Jones 2006).
Within common multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) virtual architecture often appears as a
replication of the real world. However, the "natural" condition of virtual architecture is neither static nor
in a flux - both are conditions to be created. One could say that the natural condition of virtual
architecture is an instruction, waiting to be executed.
In one of our research projects - a virtual exhibition of architectural design in Second Life - the
programmed architecture behaves like a dynamic and reactive agent, penetrates itself, and constructs
unexpected arrangements. For the user architecture becomes a rule - the first rule whose
understanding constitutes the entry to a new world. In our example architecture is and defines the
concept of the exhibition world.
This paperīs focus will be on negotiating the above mentioned questions of immersion and perception
of virtual architecture, and furthermore on examining the possibilities to create new ways of perceiving.

Keywords:
virtual reality, MUVE (multi-user virtual environment), perception, immersion, virtual architecture

Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.