The Place I have Picked!

As i said in my last post that I am going to be picking a place here on earth to create it digitally by 3D modelling it, here is the place i have picked. Its called Berry Head Arch and it is located in Newfoundland, Canada. I will then use the digital version and and ask people a question that can relate to, does this look like its from a video game or does this place look real and so on but i haven't got to that question yet :)

 

The reason i have chosen this location is because of how unusual and "unreal" it looks. From the picture is doesn't look all that big but when you look closer and see how small the trees are then you get the sense of scale. I could just image a battle going on on this arch in a video game! It would be a awesome sight! 

Anyway, I have gathered different images of this place from different angles so i get a good view. So over the next few posts i will be just posting up the process of how i am going to re create this arch.

The Unreal but Real!

This is a post i should of put up a while ago but i completely forgot! its going a little bit away from virtual reality but i will be getting back to that pretty soon.

A couple weeks ago I was searching on the internet for unreal places but they looked real. However i came across places that are actually here on earth that look like they have just been pulled out from our own imagination.
So i thought to myself, I wonder what it would be like if i made some of these scenes digital and made them into my own little environments, would people believe they were real places or say they are real but only in a game world. I could then do some sort of comparison or little test and ask people a valid question.

As i then went on to Virtual Reality i forgot about this, but after speaking with the my tutors yesterday, they told me go ahead with this as it is still to do with the virtual world and so on.

So here are some of the fascinating places i have found here on earth!










These are just some of the places i have found around the world. I will now select one place and model it in 3D so i can do a comparison of the real and unreal :)

Virtual Reality tried by consoles

Virtual Reality has been tried by many consoles and handheld consoles. Playstation brought out a controller called the "Playstaion Move" for the Ps3 which was a wand like controller which was motion censored. It worked with the Playstation eye camera as this detected the Move by the different colours that light up at the end of the Move.
Users could play games while standing up or sitting down but they could interact with the game by moving around or just by moving there arms. Even though users didn't feel like they were in the game, they still had that sense of interaction and so this made immersion greater. However sometimes the Playstation eye didn't sensor or track your movements very well and so immersion could easily be broken. The user always had to have the Move within sight of the Playstation eye and for some games like a exercise one, it was difficult as you were holding the Move.


However Microsoft had a camera called the Kinect which also was motion censored but the user didnt have to hold anything in order for this to work. The user could move freely and the Kinect would pick up the user but the user still had to be in shot of the Kinect.. Like the move the user always had hold it, doing exercise game on the Kinect was better as there was nothing to hold.


The Wii is also a create competitor as the Wii is all based on physically interacting with games.


Both camera have developed more now that the next gen consoles have came out but still there isnt much else been done with the Playstation Move or the Kinect. They both can pick the user up but as for games, it really hasn't gone beyond what we saw a couple of years ago.

Virtual Reality Brief Evolution

So as I have had a small change of direction and now I am looking into immersion within virtual reality, I have been looking at the evolution of this and seeing were did it all start. As we all know virtual reality is normally created using goggles that have a screen for each eye and the creates the sensation of being in a 3d world that is around us everywhere.

Virtual reality has been around since after the first emissions of the colour television, this was when the first machines and helmets started to come around. In 1956 Morton Heilig invented the first virtual reality machinese called Sensoramaand it had full 3D video, audio vibrations and odours. 

In 1961, Corme and Byen built the first helmet called HeadSight. This had a CRT screen and used a tracking system so it knew the direction of your head. This was also being developed for military applications. The idea was to be able to control something remotely. 

1966 Tom Furness created the first flight simulator. 

1968 Sutherland and Bob Sproul created another helmet but this had augmented reality also. This was called Damocles Sword. It was very heavy and unrealistic as it only generated a 3D wire.

Through the 70s and 80s better graphics were being tested and developed but the computers didn't have sufficient performances to generate it. 

In the 90s virtual reality took a turn and Antonio Medina designed a virtual reality system to drive robots on Mars from Earth. As this was in real time, there were delays in between the signals sent. 

As you can see from above, Virtual reality today can be used for a lot of things such as controlling robotic arms, video games, for simulators and so on. Virtual reality has poised to change the way we interact and become immersed in non physical worlds. Virtual reality will still grow and develop and as this happens it will become more better, cheaper and accessible. 

What is Virtual Reality?

Heyy

I have been looking into some things on Virtual Reality and i am just going to give a brief overview on what it actually is and why does it cause such a greater immersion for people.

Virtual Reality can give someone the perception of actually feeling that you are in a non-physical world. This perception is caused by surrounding the person with sound, images and other stimulii that make up the non-physical environment.

With this, the user feel much more involved in the non-pysical world as the user has the power to also interact with this world. These two conbinations of immersion and also being able to interact is also known as "Telepresence". The user forgets about the real world, his/her present identity, their situation and so on and they just immerse themselves into imagination, exploration and adventure.



There is 4 kinds of immersion which are:

• Tactical Immersion
• Strategic Immersion
• Narritive Immersion
• Spatial Immersion 

As i have mentioned earlier in my posts about "The Theory of Spatial Presence", this again is one of the main immersions in Virtual Reality.

In a talk at the Steam Dev Days in 2014 by Michael Abrash, According to his research at Valve, the list below is what is needed to be able to cause Spatial Presence Immersion through Virtual Reality:

• A wide field of view
• Good resolution
• Low pixel persistence
• A good refresh rate
• Global display where pixels are illuminated simultaneously
• Optics
• Excellent Tracking
• Low latency

With this being a overview of virtual reality about what it is and what are some of the main factors to get spatial presence immersion, I will now look at some of the technology that has been done to carry out virtual reality and also just see what I learn from it :) 

A little change of direction....

As i have been looking into immersion within video games and other media over my last few posts, i have found out some interesting things about what causes immersion, what people do and dont like and so on. I have even looked into does fantasy always have to follow the realistic rule and why cant it be fantasy and not just like the every day world we see when we look out the window.

Anyway with all this information, I feel i want to steer away from fantasy and reality and look into something else that could cause incredible immersion and believabilty...VIRTUAL REALITY! Surely enough a player can get immersed into a game by just looking at a screen, but with technology getting better by the day, I believe virtual reality is the way to go if a player wants to take that immersion up a notch!

So my next posts are going to be looking at immersion in virtual reality and maybe a little bit of 3D as again, technology has got better so now things can pop out the TV so this can give immersion that extra kick!

Is Realism a important factor in a Fantasy game?

Hey,

As I found out in my post that fantasy is what players like the most about games, I have came across a question which is why do so many people care about a video game being realistic when the majority of players like the fantasy setting? What is so special about "realism" when video games can offer players the impossible and limits that can go beyond our own reality?

Many games these days are based on fiction/fantasy such as, The last of us, Assassins creed and so on but yet they are bound by the rules of "Realism" to a certain extent. Is this why so many games feel and look the same? Yes technology is a big factor in this argument and as i have previously said in my other posts, believability and realism is one big factor to players getting immersed in the game worlds.

Saying that, couldn't players just be immersed in the same way by a game that completely ignores the rules that it has to be realistic? Of course a game that is based on a modern war would make perfect sense to be realistic, but when it comes to fantasy, why is this being made realistic? Shouldn't this be the complete opposite and be yes believable but then also original.

It is funny how fantasy based game worlds still have the rules of our own real world and as i stated in my last post, because people are so familar with dwarves, elves, wizards and so on, that nothing else has really been done considering fantasy could be just almost anything and anything can be created.

So is it a case of gamers these days simply like the realistic fantasy style or is is because it is much simpler for game company's to develop instead of creating a whole new world with completely new rules which has nothing to do with the real life we live in. 

To me fantasy should be kept as fantasy and look magical with bright colours or be very dark and gloomy depending on what type of game it is. You can still get a good looking game with the technology we have today without the rules of it has to be realistic looking. I have been reading a book called "Half-Real, video games between real rules and fictional worlds" on page 12 there is a statement by Erving Goffman 1972 and he suggests that even though the Board game chess has fancy shaped pieces, these shapes are unimportant to the actual play of the game. 

"Games illustrate how participants are willing to forswear for the duration of the play any apparent interest in the aesthetic, sentimental or monetary value of the equipment emplued, adhering to what might be called rules of irrelevance. For example, it appears that whether checkers are played with bottle tops on a piece of squared linoleum, with gold figurines on a inlaid marble, or with uniformed men standing on coloured flagstones in a specially arranged court square, the pairs of players can start with the same positions, employ the same sequence of strategic moves and countermoves and generate the same contour of excitement" 

This is basically stating that in some context, it doesn't matter how something looks as you can still get the same excitement from it. This can be said with the realistic fantasy world question. What if a fantasy world didn't follow the rules of being realistic? What if there was a fantasy world with purple grass or something your imagination could think of as complete bonkers. Would players still get the same excitement and spatial presence aka immersion that just a ordinary realistic fantasy game?

To me, realism does not make the game any better, its the believably and other factors such as good characters and story that make a game.

Fantasy is the key!

Heyy,

After researching into immersion and after reading what factors cause immersion in films and so on, i then asked myself the key question, "What genre in game worlds get players more immersed?"

As i already knew, in films its the things that dont make sense in the real world like talking cars or giant robots that transform into cars that got viewers immersed, so is it the same for video games? I then came across this journal that answered my question!

The journal is by the "International Journal of Computer Games Technology" Volume 2011 Article ID 282345 and its by David Weibel and Bartholomaus Wissmath.

It states in the first paragraph that a broad survey was taken out and they found that amongst 30,000 players. a high percentage of them users played video games because they like to be immersed in fantasy worlds.

I then asked myself, what type of fantasy is more popular in Games and with people,  After doing some research it came to my attention that it is in fact  Pseudo - Medieval fantasy that is more popular than any other fantasy setting such as Sci-Fi or modern fantasy.

This fantasy setting is more popular because its wonderful, familiar and simple. Medieval fantasy is full of  warriors, powerful wizards, villages protected by magic, dragons, dwarves, goblins, elves and many more but this is what people like and have grew up with and all this is very familiar and people know it works. However a futuristic sci fi setting would be very good as well with spaceships, space wizards and so on but this is unfamiliar with people and there is allot more to consider as it is more complex (design wise). 

The Theory Of Spatial Presence (aka Immersion)

As i have been researching into immersion within video games, i came across this article called " The Psychology of immersion in video games" and this article talks about how researchers have been studying "immersion" withing media for years. However researchers don't call it immersion, they call it "Spatial Presence".

The reason why researchers call it this is because Spatial Presence is often there within players when media contents such as games, is perceived as real and that players experience a sensation and feeling of being spatially located within the game world.

A couple of years ago a man called Werner Wirth and a group of other researches sat down and come up with a theory about what makes a player leave the real world behind. Here is a chart of his theory:


Werner Wirth concluded that Spatial Presence happens in 3 stages:

1. Players form a image in their minds of the game world with which they are presented with. what this means is, the player has a mental model of the game world from various cues such as images, movement and sounds and maybe other assumptions they might have. once this has been created in the players mind, he/she will then decide whether they feel they are in the game world or still in the real one.  
2. Players then begin to favor the game world that they are in and use this as a point of reference. The psychological term is  "Primary ego reference frame"
3. Profit

That was just a overview of what Spatial Presence is. I will research more into this to get a better understanding of it.