Casino Immersion = Multi-sensory environment + elimination of “outside world” reminders + attentive needs fulfillment + “make me feel important”

Casino Sticky Immersion = Casino Immersion + Effective ability to meet expectations + Surpassment of expectations in an impactful way + delivery of services better than the next-best provider

Hypnosis is a blunt form of demonstrating Federated Reality(your awareness/mind are detached, but still in partnership with your body). Hypnosis may have its own goals, but the first objective is to shift patient awareness away from physical stimulation.

Hypnotic Immersion = patient willingness + effective tool(i.e. therapist)

VR must deliver the best of a Casino, and the willingness of a Hypnosis patient

VR Immersion = Union of(Casino Immersion + Hypnotic Immersion)
VR Sticky Immersion = Union of(Casino Sticky Immersion + Hypnotic Immersion)

* From Twitter user @SurrealNumbers (http://twitter.com/SurrealNumbers/), whose Twitter bio says, “Mathematical scientist engaged in research, design, and development for augmented tourism, virtual education, and immersive information.” He or she describes the formula as “Immersion = (user control) + (breadth and depth of detail) + (degrees of freedom) + (self expression) – (sterility) Q.E.D.

* From Twitter user @sonicviz (http://twitter.com/sonicviz/), who is Paul Cohen of SonicViz. Paul’s formula is “Connectivity + Context = “Immersive Killer App”

John: Like you, I see great value in describing an immersive environment not as a thing but as a place. And I like where you’re going with describing the place more and more specifically. You’ll see in the report we published today titled “How to Write a Business Case for Immersive Technology Investments” (http://www.thinkbalm.com/2009/09/08/how-to-write-a-business-case-for-immersive-tech-investments/)that we recommend that advocates and implementers describe the solutions they are proposing as a collaborative workspace, a convention center, rehearsal studio, or facility operation center.

While I see the need (and support the effort) to arrange these things in a continuum, and don’t disagree with the characterization of dipoles as such (e.g., ‘cartoony’ vs. ‘photoreal’), I think it’s important to clarify that what we’re doing, here, is specifying which platform characteristics tend collectively to induce a complex psychological state in users, and note that the subjective experience of immersion (and, I would argue, the capacity for immersion, which is highly variable) is independent of any particular platform characteristic. So any of these points are debateable — I’ve achieved immersion with _no_ graphics (in various forms of IM and online chat, and in text-based MMOs), with primitive graphics (Everquest Online), with photoreal graphics (SL), and with surreal graphics (World of Warcraft). So it’s clearly not about the graphics, per se. And yet — on the other hand — it _is_, because we’ve all noted the improvement in our own subjective experience of immersion, and in others, as graphics density improves.

I agree with Richard – I think we may need to look more closely at immersion. For starters, we might break it down this way:

Scenario – Immersion happens within a scenescape — an ‘online place’ that evokes notions of location, topology, geography. At the very simplest level, a named IM chat-room (no graphics) can be considered a ‘place where people meet.’ And this is, I think, the core of one continuum of immersion: the transition-point between thinking of an online software instance as a tool, and thinking of it as a ‘place.’

I suspect this is the only level at which platform characteristics absolutely determine the capacity of an application to ‘be immersive’ in the sense that we mean, and they do so at a very, very low and fundamental level — e.g., simply by maintaining instantiation and showing traces of human activity — well below considerations of graphics or communications modes and affordances.

Reference frame – Once placefulness is established, the next question is whether is the environment enables users to apply known operational reference frames to assist navigation, use-reasoning, etiquette/protocol and constrain task-specific language. i.e., Given that an IM chatroom can be construed as a ‘place,’ what does it take to then let us construe it also as a ‘classroom’ (to quote a reference frame with which we’re all familiar), and thus infer how to interact in it?

Continuity of self-representation – This is where avatars (of various sorts) come in — be they photoreal or as simple as user-selected ‘screen names,’ it seems as though we all agree that unless the self is represented in some continuous way in an online environment, the environment isn’t immersive.

Communications ‘flow’ – I’m undecided as to whether realtime communications is absolutely necessary for immersion, but certainly, even in asynchronous environments, the sense that one is engaging in conversation seems critical to engender a sense of immersion.

Social memory and validation of experience – For humans, places are about ‘who uses them’ and ‘what happens there.’ I’d argue that we’re more moved to acknowledge the immersive character of a platform/place if our memories of ‘what happened there’ are validated as placeful memories by other people. So there’s a sense in which the whole hierarchy of immersion — at any level above very basic platform conditions expressed in software — is modulated by social convention.

Not to complect or distort the dialogue, but it’s a little like ‘eroticism,’ isn’t it? There’s the mechanics, and then there’s the infinitely-complex and lyrical social web we build on it — along with the sense that immersion, a la pornography, is ‘hard to define but I know it when I see it.’ (grin)

•According to Winifred Gallagher, author of the recently published “Rapt”, we constantly make decisions determining what we are going to pay attention to. Any events, experiences, and activities not within the scope of our chosen interest will not exist to us as we immerse ourselves in our selected targets of concentration and focus. What we choose to concentrate on defines our state of consciousness and becomes our Reality.

• The fact that our mind and body may be “in two different places at the same time” is not a unique characteristic of Virtual Reality, and does not therefore create the need to refer to this immersive technology as “Virtual Reality”
–If we are deep within our own thoughts, and no longer mindful of our physical surroundings, are we in “virtual reality” ?
–If we are reading a news article on a website, and are so engrossed that we forget that we are late for a meeting, do we say that “virtual reality” interfered with “physical reality”?

•The power of “Virtual Reality” software is in its ability to emancipate the mind from the body, making physical “reality” a minor element of our Federated Reality.
–Federated Reality has two parts:
•Consciousness
•Physical Existence
–For our purposes, we will always need to address the requirements of Physical Existence and Consciousness. However, it is our objective to relegate Physical Existence to nothing more than a set of requirements for accessing a medium that will manipulate the Consciousness away from Physical Existence

•In other words, people have bodies: eyes, hands, etc. We must build software that provides convenient physical access. But after t hat, the vast majority of our attention will be turned to capturing the full attention of the user
–We use “federated” to mean that the two parts of Reality have a partnership, but are not so close as to be synonymous. They are individualy self-sustaining.

•At Étape Partners we believe that there is only one relevant reality, and it is defined as:
– A context of stimulation that acutely focuses awareness and defines our state of consciousness.

Dick: Good point about the background sounds. I agree, that adds to immersion.

See http://www.linkedin.com/e/vaq/6786617/2005729/6302983/view_disc/

Also, we aren’t far off from olfactory cue technology being available to the home user, and this could be huge.

Great Grid!

1) I like the low-high scale. Perhaps we could expand this to a 5-point scale of immersive, where each level has a specific set of requirements

2) We also need a set of factors on the ‘soft’ side, like the impacts (feelings, thoughts) on a person. What is the term where you intimately identify with your avatar as being yourself? And, when you feel as if you were truly in the virtual environment rather than sitting at your desk in a boring office?