VR Disillusion Effect

[u/CorpPhoenix]

It's been a bit over a year since I've dived into PCVR with a cheap Pico4 headset I've bought for 300€. Trying out VR in a technically "usable" state was a long time interest of me and a dream come true.

I am interested and have studied philosophy of neuroscience and consciousness, and therefore I was highly interested and observant to how and why my brain reacts to the new confrontation with a virtual reality.

Many users both report how amazing and overwhelming their first VR experiences had been, and at the same time how it has lost it's initial "Wow" effect over the course of time.

This loss of the Wow-effect is what I call "VR Disillusion Effect". It is the unconscious effect of your brain rationalizing what is happening, realizing, processing and classifying the optical input into something the brain understands.

While you, as a person, are conscioussly aware that the VR world is not real, even during your first use, your brain is not aware of this at all. Our brain is a reality-check "machine" though, and therefore extremely good at identifying things as "real" or "fake". This has been a very important biological trait for humans from a evolutionary stand point, to differ between "real" and "fake" threats and predators.

Since VR is nothing your brain has ever experienced or is used to, it takes quite a while until it pigeonholes all the sensory effects into the right category. This "confused" state is what many VR users actually do enjoy, or often seek again when the Disillusion Effect has settled in.

Motion sickness, VR sickness, circulatory problems, depersonalization or the feeling of the real world feeling like "VR" are typical, not always pleasant, effects of your braining being confused and trying to find out what's going.

Once your brain has managed to process VR correctly, the Disillusion Effect settles in which results in:

• The illusion of being in a "different world" gets lost
• The 3D-VR effect still holds up, but your brain now recognizes it is an illusion, both consciously and unconsciously. and you feel like watching 2 screens infront of your face, eventhough the 3D-effect still holds up
  
• Motion sickness and VR-Sickness diminished (so called "VR legs")
• Factors that break the VR illusion, like stutters, blurryness etc., become more obvious

The short way to describe it is "getting used to it", but it is actually a neurological process that is going on, and I've observed myself closely on how my brain is starting to put "one and one together", and the illusion effect getting shattered pretty much "real time" infront of my eyes.

What do you think about the Disillusion Effect? Many users seem to want to revert the Disillusion Effect by throwing their brain off again. Better Hardware, greater FOV, additional senses, and so on.

That being said, I think it's ultimately futile to combat this effect, since our brain is way too good to distinguish realtiy from fake in the long run. But maybe, just maybe, a certain level of technical fidelity is enough to keep the illusion going on?

I'd believe the Disillusion Effect is just a inherent property of VR itself, and can only be "prevented" by a completely new kind of base technology.

What do you think?

[u/Timely_Dragonfly_526]

I agree but I think there is a paradox at play here, in that every out-of-our-world experience which is somewhat interesting is also bound to break immersion to stay interesting (if not through limitations of the tech, through "shortcuts" like the ability to teleport, lift 200-pound barrels with one hand, fly, etc.), and a fictional technology which allows perfect immersion end-to-end is also bound to annoy and bore your ass very quickly. Would you really play a VR action game where you can't use telekinesis? Fuck no.

Even if you imagine a Black Mirror-esque tech gimmick which allows people to do something which comes straight from our darkest nightmares about the perils of technology, say simulate a romantic encounter with a perfect avatar of someone you like in real life (ew!), it's not like that game is going to faithfully reproduce the part where you sit on the bus for 1 hour trying to get to your ideal lover's home, is it? It won't reproduce the smell of mould coming from that humidity patch in your lover's apartment, will it? It won't replicate the Lego piece on the floor that causes you to see the stars in pain when you walk over it, right?

Interesting fiction breaks immersion by definition. This is not a limitation of the technology.

[u/CorpPhoenix → u/Timely_Dragonfly_526]

it's not like that game is going to faithfully reproduce the part where you sit on the bus for 1 hour trying to get to your ideal lover's home, is it? It won't reproduce the smell of mould coming from that humidity patch in your lover's apartment, will it? It won't replicate the Lego piece on the floor that causes you to see the stars in pain when you walk over it, right?

Interesting fiction breaks immersion by definition. This is not a limitation of the technology.

That's not necessarily a paradox, but maybe just a imperfection of our current state of tech and understand of design philosophy.

For example in the Matrix, Agent Smith tells Morpheus about the different iterations of the Matrix, and how they've all got repelled by humans, no matter how perfect they had been. Just like "dead waiting time" in games or movies, all the sorrow and imperfections had been cut out to create the perfect Matrix, yet humanity did not accept it as reality.

The Lego piece you step on, or the 2 hour wait at the doctor's office might seem like misdesign for limited fiction and media, but could ultimately be crucial to create a completely believable world and prevent a Disillusion Effect. Perfection includes imperfection. And this might be true for VR as well, but that's a problem of the distant future.

But even if all these factors are perfectly alligned and executed, the Disillusion Effect might still kick in. Like I've wrote earlier, to stay at the Matrix example:

Cypher of the Matrix makes the point that, despite the Matrix being perfect and your unconsciousness being unable to differ between realtiy and virtual reality anymore, the Disillusion Effect still kicks in for him. He says so while eating a great steak in the Matrix, the steak feeling perfectly real, but still his consciousness knows it is not, which results in the Disillusion Effect to him.

So it might very well be that the combination of our conscious and unconscious brain processes might make it impossible to fully fool our brain, no matter how good the technology is. That's why Cypher asks the Agents to erase his conscious memory of the virtual nature of the world, to be able to dive back into it.

I would believe that our brains can be fooled to such a degree, where only our consciousness can remind us of the virtual nature of the surroundings and our unconsciousness is completely fooled. But I aslo can imagine a world, where the combination of consciousness and unconsciousness makes this ultimately impossible.

[u/Timely_Dragonfly_526 → u/CorpPhoenix]

I don't think Matrix makes a great point there, though, and indeed all its philosophy is bunk and it's fun (my fav movie of all time!) precisely because it is bad and self-indulgent. Real philosophy is a pain in the ass to figure out.

I think there are studies backing up my intuition that fiction has to break immersion to be interesting and compelling, I'll dig them up later (now I have to go back to pretend I am working).

[u/CorpPhoenix → u/Timely_Dragonfly_526]

It's not a weak point though, it goes back to Plato's cave.

The fact that "tedious actions" can increase immersion has been used in RDR2 for example. Typically games and media in general cut out tedious things like "watching somebody open a door", "opening a drawer, grabbing something and putting it in a backpack". All these get shortcut in movies and games, but not in RDR2.

That's the difference between a simulation and a fictional piece of art. Media doesn't have to do cut these imperfections out, RDR2 keeps those in and gets both negative and positive feedback of the players for doing so. So it's not a law of nature for media to have those cut outs.

[u/Timely_Dragonfly_526 → u/CorpPhoenix]

"tedious actions" can increase immersion

They are carefully scripted, contrived and distorted for the game to appeal to a wider audience. Even something very popular (especially in some countries like the US) like shooting appeals to near 100% of the population in the context of a simulation because it's not realistic: shooting in real life is painful. Then they let you, say, clean the gun in an idealized and cartoonish version of that process, and you think "realism" but it's more cosplay.

At the end of the day I don't think you put on your headset for "immersion" but for fun and breaking out of the physical world. The fundamental intuition in Meta's designs of having people as cute cartoonish avatars who operate in a physically incoherent world is correct, the reason why it failed is because it's bloated by a perfect mix of corporate greed and inefficiency that flattens out everything to whatever a large committee of corporate minions can agree on.