M. McGinity: The complex structure of phenomenal realness (and other adventures in virtual reality)

Abstract

The TU Dresden Immersive Experience Lab conducts interdisciplinary research into the perceptual foundations, applications and implications of immersive media - media in which virtual or remote entities or worlds are experienced, in some manner, as if real and present. One of our goals is to understand the kinds of fictional worlds that can evoke phenomenal realness, and how we might go about constructing them. For this, however, we must first understand the various ways that things can be experienced as real, for experiments with virtual reality have revealed realness to be multi-faceted, with the virtual appearing real in some regard, while simultaneously appearing unreal in others.

In this talk I will describe how we use immersive media to study the phenomenal and behavioural structure of realness and its relationship to intra- and inter-modal congruence and incongruence. I’ll describe some of the challenges we face with ineffability and inaccessibility in our experiments, methods to overcome them, and then conclude with some observations on the fundamental role of perceptual incongruence in art.

Website of the Junior Professorship for Immersive Media

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https://tu-dresden.zoom.us/j/81228738941?pwd=VFBTNWdDWDhoeWdmTjhibkRIVi9Odz09
Meeting-ID: 812 2873 8941
Kenncode: &R5h&?T2