The medium of "immersive virtual space" or virtual reality—as it is generally known—has intriguing potential as an arena for constructing metaphors about our existential being-in-the-world and for exploring consciousness as it is experienced subjectively, as it is felt. Such environments can provide a new kind of "place" through which our minds may float among three-dimensionally extended yet virtual forms in a paradoxical combination of the ephemerally immaterial with what is perceived and bodily felt to be real.

My work as an artist explores VR's capacity for refreshing our "ways of seeing" through the design of immersive virtual environments unlike those of our usual sensibilities. Osmose (1994-95) is an interactive, "fully immersive," virtual environment that uses a stereoscopic head-mounted display, three-dimensionally localized interactive sound, and an embodying inter-face driven by the user's breath and balance. There are nearly a dozen "realms" in Osmose, metaphorical reconstructions of "nature" as well as philosophical texts and software code. The visual elements within these realms are semi-transparent and translucent.[1]

Since mid-1995, more than five thousand people [approximately 25,000 people, as of November 2007]† have been immersed in Osmose. The overall effect on immersants appears to be quite complex. Many of their responses are surprising in terms of emotional intensity, ranging from euphoria to tears of loss. The experience of seeing and floating through things, along with the work's reliance on breath and balance as well as on solitary immersion, causes many participants to relinquish desire for active "doing" in favor of contemplative "being." In comparing their reactions with those generated by psychological research into traditionally-induced altered states of consciousness, I have come to believe that full-body immersion in an "unusual" virtual environment can potentially lead to shifts in mental awareness. That this may be possible has many implications, some promising, some disturbing.[2]

Changing Space

Thirty years ago, in The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard examined the psychologically transformative potential of "real" environments like the desert, the plains, and the deep sea, immense open spaces unlike the urban environments to which most of us are accustomed:

By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating. … For we do not change place, we change our nature.[3]

Bachelard's poetic insight into the psychological effects of "changing space" is echoed by psychologists documenting the effects of traditional contemplative practices in terms of altering states of consciousness. According to Arthur Deikman's "Deautomatization and the Mystic Experience," the conditions fostered by such practices involve a dehabituating or "deautomatizing" of perceptual sensibilities.

Deautomatization is an undoing of psychic structure permitting the experience of increased detail and sensation at the price of requiring more attention. With such attention, it is possible that deautomatization may permit the awareness of new dimensions of the total stimulus array—a process of "perceptual expansion."

… Deautomatization is here conceived as permitting the adult to attain a new, fresh perception of the world by freeing him from a stereotyped organization built up over the years and by allowing adult synthetic functions access to fresh materials.

… The general process of deautomatization would seem of great potential usefulness whenever it is desired to break free from an old pattern in order to achieve a new experience of the same stimulus or to open a perceptual avenue to stimuli never experienced before.[4] (italics added)

This dehabituating of perception tends to occur as a result of certain psychological conditions, such as when the participant's attention is intensified and is directed toward sensory pathways; when there is an absence of controlled, analytic thought; and when the participant's attitude is one of receptivity to stimuli rather than defensiveness or suspicion.[5]

Most often attained through rigorous training in age-old meditation techniques (drug-induced experiences are outside the scope of this essay), such conditions lead to an undoing of habitual perceptions—in favor of alternative sensibilities. While these may be less efficient in terms of biological or psychological survival, psychologists believe that they permit experience of aspects of reality previously ignored. The experience of these unusual sensibilities includes:

• an intense sense of "realness," as when inner stimuli become more real than objects
• transcendence of time and space
• unusual modes of perception
• feelings of undifferentiated unity or merging (e.g., a breakdown of distinctions between things and/or the self and the world)
• ineffability or verbal indescribability
• a profound sense of joy or euphoria
• a paradoxical sense of being in and out of the body[6]
  

Osmose: Breathing In and Letting Go

These "unusual" sensations are eerily similar to what many people claim they have experienced during immersion in Osmose. Among the responses we have gathered through written comments, correspondence, and video interviews, a substantial number of participants have reported the following:

• a feeling that they had indeed been somewhere else, in another "place"
• losing track of time (a fifteen-minute session was nearly always experienced as five, a thirty minute session as ten)
• heightened awareness of their own sense of being, or as one immersant described it: "as consciousness embodied, occupying space"[7]
• a deep sense of mind/body relaxation
• an inability to speak rationally or put logical words together afterward
• a feeling of freedom from their physical bodies and an acute awareness of them at the same time
• intense emotional feelings, including euphoria and/or an overwhelming sense of loss when the session was ending, causing some to cry and others to exclaim they were no longer afraid of dying.

In addition, we have observed a pattern of behavior among participants during immersion. After becoming accustomed to the interface of breath and balance, most people become intent on "doing," traveling around to see as much as possible in what appears to be an extension of everyday goal-oriented, action-based behavior. After ten minutes or so, however, most undergo a change: their facial expressions and body gestures loosen, and instead of rushing, they slow down, mesmerized by their own perceptions within the space. In this final phase, attention seems to be directed toward the unusual sensations of floating and seeing through things in what becomes a kind of slow-motion perceptual "free-fall."

What is going on here?

If these responses are anything to go by, then it appears that immersive virtual space, as evidenced by Osmose, can indeed be "psychically innovating," to use Bachelard's words. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of immersive virtual space. Here, ephemeral virtuality coexists with an apparent three-dimensionality of form, and feelings of disembodiment can coexist with those of embodiment (given the use of an embodying interface as in Osmose). These paradoxical aspects, in combination with the ability to kinesthetically interact with the elements within the space, create a very unusual experiential context.

I want to emphasize, however, that the medium's perception-refreshing potential is possible only to the extent that a virtual environment is designed to be unlike those of our usual sensibilities and assumptions. In Osmose, for example, the immersant can unexpectedly see through things and float through them as well. Thus the "familiar" becomes the unusual. This creates room for other modes of perception: instead of the mind being on autopilot it begins to pay attention, in the present, to what is unusual and unknown.

Osmose: Unusual Sensibilities

Osmose does not reconstruct the world as we habitually perceive it (as empty space containing solid, static, hard-edged, and separate objects, with rigid distinctions between subject, object, figure and ground). Instead, Osmose uses transparency and luminous particles to "desolidify" things and dissolve spatial distinctions. When the immersant moves within the space, multiplicities of semi-transparent, three-dimensional forms as well as abstract foreground "flecks" combine to create perceptual ambiguity and slippages between figure and ground, near and far, inside and out. Compared to the all too familiar literal representational style commonly associated with three-dimensional computer graphics, this more evocative aesthetic intensifies the perceptual and cognitive process.

For the user-interface, a method was developed that relies on the participant's own breath and balance rather than on conventional, hand-oriented methods such as joystick, wand, trackball, or glove—all of which tend to support a distanced and disembodied stance toward the world. This approach, based on breathing in to rise, out to fall, and leaning to change direction, brings the experience inward, "grounding" it within the core of the participant's physical body. Conceptually informed by the scuba diver's practice of buoyancy control, this hands-off technique "frees" participants from the urge to handle and control the world of "objects."[8] This approach was intended to "reaffirm" the role of the subjectively-experienced, "felt" body in cyberspace, in direct contrast to its usual absence or objectification in virtual worlds. The use of breathing and balance also tends to deeply relax people, creating a tranquil state of mind and body.

The feelings reported by various participants were probably intensified by the solitary nature of the experience, as well as by the fact that the work is "fully immersive," (its space is perceived as totally enveloping, due to our use of a wide-field-of-view head-mounted display.) These aspects, in combination with the three-dimensionality of the work and the fluid, interactive sound, act to amplify the embodied yet virtual nature of the experience.

While the psychological effects of full-body immersion in a computer-generated virtual environment like Osmose have yet to be scientifically analyzed, the potential of the medium to dehabituate our sensibilities and allow for a resensitization of the perception of being invites further exploration.

Implications

Not to be forgotten is the possibility of the medium's potency being used to replace bodily experiences of the "real" with phantasms of virtual utopias. In her preface to Rethinking Technologies, Verena Andermatt Conley writes about our loss of "humanness" in the wake of the world "becoming technological."[9]

In view of the grim prospect of the twenty-first century, we are compelled to ask how critics of culture, philosophers, and artists will deal with technologies. How do they contend with expansionist ideology, and the accelerated elimination of diversity and of singularities? How do they resist or act?...Now, in a world where the notion of space has been completely changed through electronic simultaneity, where the computer appears to go faster than the human brain, or where "virtual reality" replaces "reality," how do philosophy, critical theory, or artistic practices deal with those shifts?[10]

This question aptly applies to immersive virtual space, especially when one considers that it will one day likely be used for such (questionable) purposes as adapting individuals to psychological and biological survival in a less and less "user-friendly" living environment. Moreover, unlike Bachelard's desert or deep sea, Deikman's meditation cell, or even an isolation tank, VR is a communicative medium, which by default carries conventional cultural values of the Western technoscientific worldview from which that technology has sprung.

The beginnings of an answer to Conley's question may have been formulated by Martin Heidegger more than fifty years ago in The Question Concerning Technology. As an alternative to what he called technology's tendency to function as an instrument of domination and control, Heidegger pointed to an earlier form of "techne" called "poiesis" by the Greeks, associated not with "challenging" but with a "bringing-forth" or "revealing" into presence. The Greeks considered this artistic activity to be somewhat equivalent to what they called physis or nature's own bursting forth of being."[11] I find inspiration here in terms of the use of immersive virtual space as a medium for "bringing forth" or "manifesting" abstract ideas into the realm of virtual "place" so that they can be kinesthetically explored and bodily lived.

This may prove to be a promising use of the medium, and, given effective subversion of its culturally-bound characteristics, may be a step toward suggesting alternative ways of seeing and being in the world. However, even so, there remains a significantly disheartening aspect. For even as "places" like Osmose may one day be accessible online as virtual sites of contemplation, so too such sites may signal the demise of traditional places of self-reflection and tranquillity. In particular this includes "nature" as we know it, as compromised in body and habitat by human activities, nature's unfathomable presences recede further and further from our urban lives. My own practice in the field of "virtual reality" thus contains a bittersweet aspect, entangled in feelings of both longing and loss.