Space, Politics, Cyberspace & Bodies: Social VR and the ‘New Normal’
SPACE & POLITICS
Img desc: A collaged image of open desktop windows including; a still from Lars Von Trier’s Dogville (2003) of black stage with sparse furniture shot from above, white writing and lines indicate streets, buildings and rooms representing the fictional town of the title. A shutterstock image of a typical ‘Womens, Mens & Disabled’ toilet sign. A still from Crazy Stupid Love (2011) in which a nude Ryan Gosling stands in a gym locker room with a towel around his neck, gesturing to his genitals which are obstructed from view by another persons head. Subtitles read “Oh, I’m sorry, is this bothering you?”
Pubs, clubs, footpaths, stadiums, cinemas, libraries, shopping centres, holy spaces, scrap yards, car parks, and backyards.
‘Spaces’ come in different shapes, uses and configurations. These encourage different kinds of ‘performances’ from their ‘users’. Different ways of walking, speaking, and interacting with other users. These social and cultural norms are both housed within and generated by the shape and structure of the built environment.
In these ‘uncertain times’ we have become more aware than ever of the ways we negotiate spaces and maneuver around one another in various public and private environments.
Kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room, waiting room, help desk, office desk, desktop.
Even different parts of these spaces, different rooms or areas, encourage their own nuanced performance via their spatial arrangement.
In our individual lockdowns, we have become more aware of the spaces of our homes. How they make us feel, and how they house our feelings. Those of us working from home for the first time have grappled with the ways that a restricted space impacts our ability to work, rest and function.
‘locker room chat’, ‘pillow talk’, ‘Office Politics’ & ‘Kitchen sink dramas’.
Phrases like these indicate that some architectural situations are associated with behaviour, and those associated behaviours are also often gendered, racialized or classed.
These prescriptive performances can be exclusionary, restrictive and harmful. A call for a masculine or macho bravado for example, can only be effectively enacted by some bodies and not others, dividing bodies into groups of ‘passing’ and ‘not passing’. Simultaneously it limits the expression of those passing bodies within narrow and restrictive parameters.
Museums, prisons, courthouses, monuments & town centres.
The design and arrangement of state structures can be read for overarching cultural messages including; which histories the state subscribes to, what activities the state sanctions, what kind of bodies the state favours in different spaces, and the forms of punishment and surveillance that the state deems necessary to enforce compliance.
Street names and public statues might, for example, commemorate historical figures for their financial contributions to cities without reference to their crimes against humanity.
Img desc: A collaged image of open desktop windows including; A getty images photo of a building entrance with brick wall and concrete floor in which metal cone spikes have been set. Text reads “Short metal spikes installed outside the entrance of a building in London on June 10, 2014. An infamous shot of a crowd around the former Edward Colston commemorative statue in Bristol City Centre, the crowd are pulling the statue down by a rope attached to its neck.
Hostile architecture, like so called ‘anti homelessness spikes’ and sloped public seating not only curb public behaviour; discouraging lengthy resting in doorways or on benches, but also serve to bar certain people from accessing public spaces and therefore in some ways society. Not only obviously those experiencing homelessness, but anyone who might benefit from more opportunities for rest including people experiencing a wide range of physical or mental disabilities or illness.
Examples of the adaptive reuse of prisons to form immigration detention centres indicates a national perspective of criminality towards those seeking asylum*.
In short: Space and its configuration is imbued with culture, with ideology, with politics. The built environment itself can exclude, police and restrict behaviour. This is hardly a new concept.
What is new however, is the recent exposure of the ‘majority’ to the lived experience of the minoritized; having the ease and frequency with which you move through space challenged, having an increased sense of an exposure to harm and danger when moving through public spaces. Experiences of confinement, of isolation and of government surveillance of one's social and spatial existence.
As we begin to fashion a ‘new normal’ we are faced with the prospect of reimagining structures, buildings & public spaces that must be altered to comply with a new ‘distanced’ way of life. Moreover, society as a whole has been challenged by ongoing cultural movements like Black Lives Matter, and the work of disability and community activists to consider in this ‘new normal’ the voices and experiences of those minoritized and victimized by the ‘old normal’. As we rebuild hybrid online and offline ways of engaging with places of work, spaces of commerce and structures of arts and culture, we are also in a unique position to dismantle previous barriers to access, to build flexible working practices, and to move beyond cultural capital attached to geography. In doing so we have an opportunity to critically examine what remains of constructs such as disability, class and race once these barriers are removed.
CYBERSPACE
Img desc: A collaged image of open desktop windows including; A still from a youtube video named ‘Facebook VR Research: Photorealistic Face Tracked Avatars’ which shows a 4 image grid on one side, a white male presenting person and Black female presenting person wear VR headsets, on the other their faces and expressions have been very accurately been remodelled as hyperrealistic avatar faces on a black background. A screenshot of a lengthy facebook post from Mark Zuckerberg on the 25 of March 2014 talking about Facebooks acquisition of Oculus VR. The 7th paragraph reads “This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experience with the people in your life”, the post has 193k ‘Likes’ 590 ‘comments’ and 29k ‘shares’. A still from Tron (1982) a computer program is represented as a colourful futuristic digital city scape, with users embodied in blue, pink and purple neon unitards. A still from the 1966 BBC adaptation of EM Foresters prescient ‘The Machine Stops’ (1928) short story, in the black and white image two people communicate via a sci-fi representation of a video call technology. In this world all inhabitants live in isolation and only connect with each other through ‘the machine’.
Multi User VR technology allows multiple people either in the same or disparate geographic locations to don a VR headset & via an internet connection come together in a virtual space. Bodies represented in real time by avatars allow users to interact with one another, the environment and potentially content; games, music, other media or digital assets. These spaces might be designed for co-working, socialising, gaming, or as digital versions of more traditional performance spaces; music concerts, clubs or theatres.
In the many visions of the future explored in literature and film, those that have predicted or utilised the internet have often represented the future of social interaction as moving online into some form of Virtual Reality. The most recent VR boom of 2015 was in no small part driven by the purchase of the Oculus headset technology by Facebook, the world's leading social media conglomerate. This implied to many that multi user VR was the future of online social interaction. [9]
As the International pandemic has illustrated, face to face contact with others isn't always going to be possible. Whether that's the ongoing effects of Covid or imminent ecological collapse, there is a need for online spaces where people can ‘be’ together when it’s not feasible in ‘RL’*. The drastic uptake of apps like Zoom across lockdown indicates that text, phone and social media based interactions were simply not enough to sustain most in this time, and that a more embodied medium was needed. The possibilities of Social Virtual Reality outstrip these video call technologies substantially. Firstly they offer far more embodied, immersive and physical ways of connecting than sound and video alone. They also offer the opportunity to interact with digital assets together, from complex co-working on architectural models to simply watching a movie in sync. Furthermore, avatar embodiment can offer real time rendering of bodies and complex facial expressions with much less bandwidth than video. The data heavy avatar models are only downloaded once, allowing the nuanced data collected by the headset on motion and expression to be delivered via a string of code, over and over, and in real time. This takes up far less digital traffic than sending video pixels, and is far more discerning - only transmitting the relevant information relating to movement of a user, rather than sending every pixel captured by your webcam of your bedroom backdrop and potted plants, for example. This real time functionality solves many of the criticisms leveled at video chat including lag - video latency of even a few milliseconds is thought to be what leads to video chat fatigue and poor productivity in video calls - and general energy & digital efficiency.
Although it does seem far fetched and perhaps dystopian that headsets might become as ubiquitous a social technology as laptops and smartphones. Or that social VR environments become our new theatres, clubs, public and social spaces. It does not seem as far fetched and impractical now, as it did before March 2020. For that reason alone it would seem important to interrogate now how these multi user VR spaces are designed and how they operate. This research made all the more pressing by the critical lens that has also been sharpened by lockdown; what cultural, ideological and political messages might be imbued into the structures and operations of these new social environments?
BODIES
Img desc: A collaged image of open desktop windows including; A grid of images in which a 90’s computer graphics style virtual forearm and tennis ball, are overlaid onto a real forearm, a lab-coated technician touches the real arm with a tennis ball like object. The image illustrates ‘the illusion of body ownership’ in VR, from Mel Slater et al and is included in reading list. A press image from Facebook Spaces, facebooks early VR social platform, it’s a POV shot from inside the experience, in what looks like a virtual surf shack, two very similar looking avatars of white men with beards and glasses lean towards the viewer as if to introduce themselves, their hovering name tags identify them as Michael and Christophe. A screenshot of an image from the Michelle Cortese, Andrea Zeller medium article about safer online spaces included in the reading list, the image itself is a collage of various journal articles with titles such as ‘Online Harm is Real’, ‘Sexual Harassment in Virtual Reality is a Big Issue’ and ‘Virtual Reality is Full of Assholes Who Sexually Harass Me, Hence Why I Keep Going Back’.
Virtual Reality, it turns out, is not about merely plugging our brains into a computer a la The Matrix, or cinema 2.0. It is a highly embodied medium. The illusion of space inside VR is maintained by the computer receiving highly complex data about body movements, and feeding corresponding visual, aural and haptic feedback to our embodied senses via the VR hardware. Jaron Lanier, a VR ‘pioneer’, describes it like this;
“Wherever the human body has a sensor, like an eye or an ear, a VR system must present a stimulus to that body part to create an example illusory world… Unlike prior media devices, every component of VR must function in a tight reflection of the motion of the human body... [one definition of VR might then be] A mirror image of a person's sensory and motor organs... An inversion of a person” [5]
Making VR environments is not only making space, but in an even more literal way than design & architecture, it is about building for and around bodies.
Furthermore, the relationship between our real bodies and the virtual bodies we inhabit in VR is complexly interlinked. The feeling of ownership over a virtual body, even a rudimentary one, can happen very quickly and very profoundly. One of the effects of this embodiment is that if the virtual body is then threatened, the physical body of the user will react. The body you control inside VR feels like yours and what happens to it can have visceral emotional & physical implications for the user.
Research from Jeremy Bailenson and the Stanford Virtual Human interaction lab is also interesting when we consider the relationship between our real bodies, our virtual bodies, our mind and the virtual space around us. His term ‘The proteus effect’ relates to the changeability of our behaviour based on the perceived physical attributes of our avatars; people who rate the avatar they are embodied in as attractive tend to act more gregarious in social VR situations, people in taller avatars negotiate more aggressively etc. [11]
Lots of claims have been made about VR and empathy. How VR allows users to ‘take another's perspective’ and Bailenson himself has undertaken a lot of research in this area. He does note in Experience on Demand [1], examples of where implicit bias has been reduced in experiment participants by getting them to embody an avatar representative of the group to which they previously had expressed bias. However he also notes a troubling instance where experiment participants, both black and white, scored higher on an implicit bias test testing racial bias after a VR experience where they embodied a black body in a job interview scenario. This outcome is thought to be because the scenario itself triggered negative culturally held stereotypes about black people and work. Virtual reality avatars seem to activate and accentuate culturally held stereotypes, both negative and positive, about attributes like height, weight, age, beauty, gender and race. What is particularly of note in this example however is that it also indicates that the venues and spaces upon which social VR environments are modelled are also highly significant, as they can house, generate and incite the cultural biases and prejudices held by users.
The fear that multi user VR spaces can exacerbate cultural bias and exclusion, rather than alleviate them, has been substantiated by many reports from users visiting existing multi user VR platforms.
Imagine it’s your first time entering a social virtual reality experience. You quickly set up an avatar, choosing feminine characteristics because you identify as female. You choose an outfit that seems appropriate, and when you’re done, you spawn into a space. You have no idea where you are or who is around you. As you’re getting your sea legs in this new environment, all the other avatars look at you and notice that you’re different. Strange avatars quickly approach you, asking inappropriate questions about your real-life body; touching and kissing you without your consent. You try blocking them, but you don’t know how. You remove your headset fearing that you don’t belong in this community. [3]
This piece of writing is an excerpt from an Immerse article by Michelle Cortese, and is based on multiple accounts of women entering early iterations of social VR. There is a wealth of writing about the negative experiences of women being sexualised, harassed, chased and assaulted in multi user VR spaces by male users. In personal experience it doesn't even require a ‘feminine’ avatar to elicit such responses. In one example from a user testing I facilitated, merely the ‘feminine’ name associated with the Oculus account and genderless driod avatar through which multiple users, including those who identified as male, entered an experience was enough to garner unwanted attention from other platform users, and caused our participants to have a much more stilted and overwhelming experience of the virtual chat platform. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that beyond being generally unpleasant, exclusionary and overwhelming, a threat to body sovereignty in VR, such as being touched, followed or moved through (in some early iterations of multi user VR it was possible for the avatars of users to pass through each others bodies) in Virtual Reality can be just as emotionally damaging, trauma inducing and triggering as unwanted touch in the corporeal world.
Not all multi user VR spaces are created equal, and the blueprints or references different multi user VR platforms take as their inspiration for the architecture and mechanics of their platforms vary; from french restaurants to office spaces, desert scenes to space stations. As one might expect, it has been noted that the cultural references of the space do impact and alter the culture and behaviour of users. This in turn leads to differences to the exclusion experienced by women and other minoritized people within these environments. Some more detailed discussions of this phenomena is included in the reading list [3,6,7]].
SOCIAL VR, ABOLITION AND THE NEW NORMAL
Img desc: A collaged image of open desktop windows including; A screenshot of a desktop virtual social platform ‘SecondLife’, multiple avatars with hovering name boxes appear to be dancing on water in a surreal seascape. A screenshot of a google image search for the term ‘homuncular flexibility’, images are of PDF texts, a VR club space and a stick and ball model of the human body. A screenshot of an article with the title ‘Across Cultures, Darker People Suffer Most. Why?’ the article has an image of Andrea 3000 on stage, he is black, he holds a microphone he is wearing a white wig and white rimmed sunglasses and a black boiler suit with the same phrase written across it in white.
There is no doubt that Social Virtual Reality technology offers some of the most embodied, immersive and physical ways of connecting in an imminent socially distant future.
But with a growing cultural awareness that ideological and political values are imbued into the built environment, that space itself reifies marginalisation, and that Virtual Space has the evidenced potential to further exacerbate prejudice, exclusions and violence, can Social Virtual Reality ever become a safe or equitable platform? Or is it doomed to mere replication and exacerbation of corporeal inequalities?
Following the Black Lives Matter protests in May and June 2020, discourse emerged in the public consciousness proposing ‘Abolition’ rather than ‘Reform’. Specifically, the abolition of the police force and prison industrial complex, because, it is argued, these institutions are so integral to the maintenance of race as a construct, and the criminalisation of black and brown bodies, that there is no way they could exist beyond or outside their current manifestations and these cultural constructs. More generally, abolitionist thought is born from the belief that some structures are simply too broken to reform, and that they will consistently produce inequality through the very nature of their material organisation. As discussed above, the material fabrications of much of our corporeal existence, of our public and private spaces, architecture and design, favours some bodies over others, marks some bodies as different to others, and thus produces and maintains inequalities and exclusion.
In thinking about futures that look safer and more egalitarian for people of colour and Black people in particular, women and trans women in particular, and disabled people (understanding of course that those identities are not mutually exclusive) we are often forced to think about space from a ‘reformist’ or ‘intervention’ perspective. Working within the bounds of existing structures; both political systems and structure of power, but also literally buildings, business models and fundamental physics. Social Virtual Reality offers something different. It offers the potential to create new visions of social spaces that can abandon inequitable spacial design, certainly, but in this process it can also fundamentally interrogate ideas of race, gender and disability as constructs.
Beyond established discourse on the philosophical potential of avatars for exploring non or post human representation, ‘gender swapping’, and ‘race swapping’ [2,4,10], it is theories such as Jaron Lanier’s concept of Homuncular Flexibility in VR, that to me illustrate the way avatar representation can illuminate to us the material production of inequality. The ways in which concepts such as race, class, gender and disability themselves can be challenged by the structure of VR spaces. And the abolitionist, rather than reformist, possibilities for embodiment that VR presents us with.
In his book Dawn of the New Everything [5], Lanier discusses his early VR development experiments and the process of coding avatars for use inside virtual worlds. He describes how occasionally the programming went wrong, and avatars were accidentally produced which had extra limbs, giant limbs or body configurations beyond what is possible from a corporal or ‘real world’ body. Mostly, inhabiting these avatars was too cognitively taxing for a user, but occasionally these bodies could be controlled, despite them bearing little relation to their own RL bodies. For example avatars which have 6 limbs or tail like limbs could be harnessed to complete tasks more or as effectively than the traditional humanoid avatar configuration, with little extra cognitive load. Rather than merely wearing an avatar that has an aesthetic tail, Lanier describes how that limb can be incorporated into the body schema of the user to perform actions or gain information about surroundings, in a similar fashion to the way a blind or partially sighted person would use a cane. More than just a tool, the information a cane gathers becomes part of the sensory information system of the user just like a limb or a sensory organ. Humans' apparent innate receptiveness to adaptations like this in Virtual Experiences is what Lanier describes as ‘homuncular flexibility’. He also discusses the potential of expanding the application of body sensors in VR. The tongue for example, because of its dexterity, might offer a far more nuanced control for interaction and movement in VR that for example, using arm or leg motion. In this way the coding of the VR space itself has abolitionist potential. In this albeit narrow example, a VR space traversed by tongue completely departs from the RL architecture which in general assumes its users walk on two legs. In RL, it is in part this bipedal bias that generates ‘disability’, and creates a hindrance for users for whom that way of moving is not as comfortable. A VR space traversed by tongue, just as one example, fundamentally alters the metrics for physical disability as it exists in the virtual world.
There are a number material and ethical concerns about the current reality of Social VR that this piece of writing has been unable to account for. Including but not limited to the ethics of the companies involved in the manufacture of headsets and platforms, and their intentions for for the vast quantities of data collected by headsets (particularly one might critically look at Facebook's ownership of Oculus), and the financial and physical inaccessibility of most VR headsets and VR systems. However what it has intended to illustrate is that Virtual Reality as a medium has the potential to profoundly highlight the relationship between the body, the built environment and difference. Virtual Reality as a medium allows us to speculatively imagine spaces which centre the safety and protection of minoritized individuals from the bottom up, built into not only the shape of spaces represented, and the rules of engagement, but literally the mechanics of platform. Imaginatively abandoning old structures is easier in the first instance, in pixels, than in bricks and mortar. In a speculative social VR we can imagine new venues, new architecture and new social environments, in which to house new kinds of embodied social experiences, and perhaps new ways of perceiving bodies, and one another, all together.
Notes to Reader
* Over 50% of those housed in detention centres are seeking or have sought asylum. Aviddetention.co.uk/Whatisdetention
** RL or ‘Real Life’ is used here to denote activity that happens not in a virtual space, rather than to suggest that virtual experiences are not in some way ‘real’, similar to other ‘cyber speak’ shorthands for corporeal interactions such as AFK ‘Away From Keyboard’.
Reading List / References
[1] Bailenson, J. (2019). Experience on Demand: what virtual reality is, how it works and what it can do. 1st ed. New York: Norton.
[2] Bailey, C. (1996) ‘Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace’, In Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. Mary Anne Moser, ed. Pp. 29-49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[3] Cortese, M., Zeller, A. (2019) ‘Designing Safer Social VR’, Immerse [online], Available: https://immerse.news/designing-safer-...
[4] Kumar, N., 2017.’ Want to change your look? We have an app for that’. The Guardian, [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/12/want-to-change-your-look-we-have-an-app-for-that
[5] Lanier, J. (2018) Dawn of the New Everything. London: Vintage.
[6] Macintosh, V. (2020) ‘Meet Me On The Other Side’, Watershed Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talks [Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt0Hnxz31V0&list=PLbP2rruaw4OvyHmG5tYtqgtJ67xIJ5rOf&index=14&t=3752s
[7] Maharaj, C. (2017) Embodiment and the Boundaries Between Us in Virtual Reality: A critical analysis of inclusivity in social virtual reality environments, Masters Thesis, Malmo University. Available: http://muep.mau.se/handle/2043/23611
[8] Slater, M. et al. (2009) Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body. Available
:https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper...
[9] Solomon, B., (2014) ‘Facebook Buys Oculus, Virtual Reality Gaming Startup, For $2 Billion’, Forbes Online,Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2014/03/25/facebook-buys-oculus-virtual-reality-gaming-startup-for-2-billion/?sh=b2ba22d24984
[10] Turkle, S. (1995) Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Touchstone: New York
[11] Yee, N., Bailenson, J. (2007) The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior, Human Communication Research [Online] ISSN 0360-3989, Available: doi:10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x
