Business & Games: The Blog

When I showed him Second Life he was surprised how anyone would be able to ‘immerse’ themselves into the software at all, and found the software really obtrusive in killing the experience of being in an actual ‘world’. These are the 5 interaction/interface related elements as used in Second Life which seriously impacted his experience and ability to immerse into the virtual world:

(Warning: Brainstorm post with extreme levels ‘Snowcrashing’ - some gaming experience advised.)

1. Teleporting vs travelling

Currently Second Life has a ‘teleport anywhere’ policy - you just have to open your map or click on one of your bookmarks and you’ll get teleported to your destination. Though practical, its very much a web reference of skipping from website to website. This feels wrong for a place that seems to have more to do with a social structure, a 3D city that’s not necessarily browsable, but more of an experience which should draw and retain your attention.

Teleporting destroys the feeling of space, place and distance, all key qualities of good immersion into something we call a world. Though not nearly as extensive as Second Life, World of Warcraft offers no means of teleporting, just faster ways of moving between distant places, and is much more of a real world because of it.

2. Ability to fly

The ability to fly kills of a large part of the immersion because it does not translate well to the way we behave in the real world. I don’t mean just the fact we are not able to fly in real life. We use objects (obstacles) to make borders, define/mark territory (walls), or to set out a certain path we can follow. The ability to fly makes these things largely obsolete. just like walls, stairs and elevators are points of reference we use all the time in the real world to navigate. The complete freedom of flight removes these ‘beacons’ and by doing so part of the immersion.

3. Full control over display settings

The interface of Second Life allows for a great deal of manipulation of what you see in-world. Don’t want clouds? You can simple remove them from the sky. Fog, trees, water - all can be removed. Another way to manipulate the environment is to adjust the time of day in Second Life - with a few clicks you changed a dark midnight sky into a bright sunrise. As the sky and time of day largely impacts how your objects are displayed (shadows, contrast and local lights all change in different settings) it limits the control the creator has over how to view the world as intended.

4. ‘Opt-In’ physics

All objects in the virtual world are ‘weightless’, they do not copy the behaviour of real objects as in the real world per default. Any object placed in the world will stay stuck mid air unless specifically told to be subject to the extensive (and recently improved) physics system Second Life uses. nothing like a hoovering house to make objects instantly feel hollow and fake. The digital smoke and mirrors area easily dispelled with the constant reminder of ‘unreality’ trough nearly every object around you.

5. Manual camera controls

At the moment, your camera is not consistently tied to your avatars position. You are able to move your camera view around freely within your ‘draw distance’ - the maximum distance between your avatar and an object before its no longer displayed to you (when your draw distance is 256 meters, you won’t be able to see a building 257 meters away until you move closer). This makes your avatar merely a point of reference instead of the looking glass. To see something/someone or something up close in the current situation, you don’t need to move at all, just zoom in. Second Life allows for a ‘first person view’ - like you are watching trough the eyes of your avatar - but with the other camera options available there is no reason to activate this.

There are 2 options games use to make your avatar literally the centre of the virtual world:

Immersion is about limitations

These issues the Second Life platform is facing with creating a deeper immersive experience have to do with creating a more physical location in cyberspace. However, you might reason we’d just be scripting in physical limitations which don’t need to be there - they have no use. Why walk or wait when you can teleport? But virtual Worlds largely exist by the grace of immersion, the ability to tell our brain this is real, and how we would (re)act. It triggers real emotions just like a good Horror movie is able to trigger fear. This is the experience that adds added value and justifies the use of Virtual Worlds when compared to the 2D web.

Some quick and dirty ’solutions’ as the result of a brainstorm on the topic:

1. Remove the ability to fly, vehicles should still be able to.
2. Allow landowners the ability to disable the user control of environmental settings while on his/her land.
3. Limit Camera Movement on land (and focus the camera on the avatar) unless the owner allows you to move it freely.
4. Return the old Teleport hub system to Second Life, where you could only travel to certain points by means of teleportation. Then provide ‘public transportation’ to get from place A to B fast - while still experiencing distance, or…
5. Create a central teleporting system for travelling over very large distances (1 central teleporting zone per ‘city sized area’ or a group of 20 sims), and local teleporting systems to go from place to place within these groups (sim to sim). Everything in between is travelling distance.
6. External object editor/creation areas to counter the problems of building inside the real of physics. Objects created this way can be opt out to not be part of the physics system (you’d have to specifically turn physics off)

Obviously these are very extensive measures and are unlikely to be ever used. Not just because of the technical implications, but the immersive solutions as suggested above seriously impact the usability of the world as we’ve become accustomed to. I think it will be interesting to see how far we’d be willing to go to place real life limitations into a virtual setting to create immersion, what will become the priority for Virtual Worlds, and I wanted to use this post to think about the implications if an environment like Second Life would focus more on creating an immersive experience.

Original Post:
http://digado.nl/a-3d-struggle-immersion-vs-usability.html