Oculus Rift: A new communication platform.

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Department of Media Studies

Oculus Rift:

A new communication platform.

New Media and Digital Culture | MA Thesis 2016 Nick van der Meulen

Date: June 24, 2016

Supervisor: dr. A. Helmond

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Abstract

In 2016, two years after Facebook announced that with their acquisition of Oculus VR they are creating a new communication platform, the consumer edition of the Oculus Rift is finally available. This research will, from a platform studies perspective, analyze in which ways the Oculus Rift, can be positioned by Facebook as its new communication platform. This will be done through discussing the key characteristics of virtual reality and analyzing the platform from both a hard- and software perspective. After investigating the apparatus and its input devices, I will explore Facebook’s Social VR demo, and review and discuss how the Oculus Rift lives up to being a communication platform.

Keywords: Oculus Rift, Virtual Reality, Facebook, Communication Platform, Platform

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1 Introduction

Virtual reality are systems through which users can immerse themselves into virtual environments, and can therefore sometimes be perceived as being relatively isolating. For outsiders, someone else who is experiencing virtual reality might not be in the most approachable position imaginable. Their eyes and ears, fully covered, give the impression that they seem to be zoned out, unable to communicate. But are they? In 2012, a young entrepreneur named Palmer Luckey revealed a $300 virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift Developer Kit on Kickstarter (Kickstarter). Its goal of 25.000 dollar was surpassed in less than 24 hours eventually reaching near to 2.5 million dollar becoming one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history (Kickstarter, Most Funded). Two years later on March 12 2014, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology, for 2 billion dollar to create a “new communication platform”. According to Zuckerberg:

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we're in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences.

This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it's different from anything they've ever experienced in their lives. (Zuckerberg,

Oculus VR

)

With the release of the consumer edition of the Oculus Rift, mass-market virtual reality seems to be on the brink of becoming a reality. Although the Oculus Rift was initially designed to be “the first truly immersive virtual reality headset for video games” (Kickstarter, Oculus campaign), with the acquisition by Facebook early adopters might just as well become able to use the Rift to enhance ordinary social experiences instead of gaming (Perry). Facebook believes that virtual reality has the potential to be more social than any other platform (Newsroom), and virtual reality can even change the way we live, work and communicate (FB Q116).

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Facebook bought Oculus because according to Zuckerberg it is essentially a social company, and that it will form the next fundamental computing environment. On the majority of Facebook’s platforms and products such as its social network, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, computer mediated communication is done verbally. The Oculus Rift platform will provide the traditional benefits of computer mediated communication by bringing people together across space and time and will in addition enable users to have real-time nonverbal- and face-to-face communication, which is generally recognized to be the ideal form of interpersonal communication (Palmer 290). This may be one of the reasons Zuckerberg thinks that, first there was the PC, then the web, and the next big step after the smartphone will be virtual reality. Even though this is a future vision from a listed company, with the acquisition by Facebook, the Oculus Rift is one of the first virtual reality technologies to receive a substantial investment to become a communication medium.

However, to understand how a virtual reality technology as the Oculus Rift can become Facebook’s new communication platform, the question arises of what virtual reality exactly entails. Just as any medium, a primary purpose for virtual reality is the communication of content or ideas (Craig et al. 34). But what makes the Oculus Rift inherently different than more ‘traditional’ media and what makes it a communication medium? Although virtual reality has been discussed in academia in length since its inception in the early 1960s (Rheingold, Sherman and Craig, Heim, Biocca and Levy, Laurel), the term itself has been used across different fields such as cinema, computer science, the medical and pharmaceutical industry, the military, the digital entertainment industry and the communications industry. In addition, it has had various purposes such as ‘multisensory experiences’, ‘as a way of immersing users into computer generated environments’, to ‘amplify human perception and cognition’, for ‘training related technologies’ and as a ‘communication medium’. The term is loosely used in discussions everywhere ranging from the internet to immersive experiences, 3D technologies, computer animations and the transformation of old media into digital ones (Lister 388). Many researchers try to avoid giving virtual reality a solid definition and therefore instead describe it according to a set of characteristics (Heim, Laurel, Sherman and Craig). Like Heim, Laurel and Sherman & Craig, I also think that creating an understanding of virtual reality is best done by exploring a set of characteristics. However, since these characteristics were generally established in relation to older virtual reality technologies, I think that it is important to pay attention to the new developments which the Oculus Rift enables and how they are positioned by Facebook as a new communication platform.

Up until now, most of the virtual reality technologies were developed for research purposes only and no coherent platforms were available to the public. The majority of research into virtual reality as a communication medium, has been conducted before the late 1990s. Since then, development of virtual reality technologies (especially in relation to a

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communication medium) seem to have stagnated. Because of the mass market consumer availability of the Oculus Rift platform, virtual reality can now be researched as a communication platform that can have a global impact on culture and society. This research will therefore investigate new development in the field of virtual reality and, at the same time, research one of the first virtual reality technologies as a communication platform. It would thereby contribute to the field of platform studies as Bogost and Montfort consider the platform to be one of the most neglected levels in the analyses of digital media (147). This research will therefore consist of a platform study which aims to answer the following question: In which ways can the Oculus Rift, through its hard- and software, be positioned by

Facebook as its new communication platform?

In order to answer the research question, the first part of this platform study will focus on the key characteristics and understandings of (social) virtual reality as a communication medium in a theoretical framework. To get an understanding of virtual reality and the Oculus Rift as a communication platform, I will first explore the history of virtual reality and discuss how different technologies preceded the Oculus Rift. Second, I will introduce the concept of social virtual reality and compare it in relation to José van Dijck’s notion of the ‘social’ in social networks. Subsequently, I will discuss how the degree of social presence differs for certain platforms based on Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein’s ‘Classification of Social Media’. Next I will look at Oculus’ position within Facebook and investigate (social) virtual reality according to the key characteristics and understandings of virtual reality discussed by virtual reality researchers Michael Heim and William Sherman & Alan Craig and VR pioneer Brenda Laurel, such as immersion, presence and the virtual. In the last part of the theoretical framework, I will explore which forms of communication virtual reality makes possible and how they are enabled.

After outlining the theoretical framework, I will, through parts of the platform studies methodology developed by Bogost and Montfort, analyze the hard- and software of the Oculus Rift, discuss how it is a platform, and explore the case study of Facebook’s Social VR demo which is the first demonstration given by Facebook with what they have in mind for the Oculus Rift as their new communication platform. Finally, I discuss my findings in relation to my research question and offer concluding remarks in which ways the Oculus Rift, through its hard- and software, can be positioned by Facebook as a new communication platform.

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2 A history of virtual reality

The birth of virtual reality can be traced back to the stereoscope, a device for viewing a stereoscopic pair of separate images invented in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone (Silverman 729). The concept of virtual reality however, was developed in the 1950s and 1960s when the first technical devices were created by the engineering wizards in the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area later becoming Silicon Valley, the home of the world’s largest high-tech corporations (McKenna 229). In the 1960s, while the largest part of western society was occupied with looking at the soothing light of network television, Mort Heilig patented and attempted to market an arcade version of what might be the first virtual reality system: The Sensorama (Fig. 1) (Rheingold 51). Heilig imagined the system to be the cinema of the future when in the early 1950s the film industry was threatened by television. Hollywood started looking at what they could do that the television people could not do. 3D movie techniques, spatialized audio, wide screens and other technical innovations that were previously unthought-of became attractive (54). According to Heilig, when you watch TV or a movie in a theater, you are sitting in one reality, and at the same time you are looking at another one through an imaginary transparent wall. However, when you enlarge that window enough, you get a visceral sense of personal involvement. “You feel the experience; you do not just see it” (55). As the name already indicated, the Sensorama was all about this sensory experience. It was built as a classic arcade cabinet and featured a three-dimensional display, vibrating seat, and scent producer, the Sensorama was Heilig’s vision of media as extension of the senses, a concept which Marshall McLuhan famously defined in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Heilig's arcade style cabinet was only a small realization of his much grander vision for a mass medium that would convey multisensory experiences to its users (Biocca and Levy 11). In 2016, such a medium for conveying multisensory artificial experiences with the Oculus Rift is becoming a reality. However, the pathways to today’s virtual reality technologies did not come from cinema alone. Rather, the development of machines to think with, the extension of computer based tools to amplify and extend the human senses, led to the emergence of a form of experience theater from the middle of a field completely different then cinema; computer science.

One of the key figures in computer science was Ivan Sutherland known as the creator of groundbreaking computer interface Sketchpad (Sutherland, Sketch pad 329). Sketchpad is considered to be the ancestor of modern computer-aided design (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. Sutherland demonstrated with Sketchpad that computer graphics could be used both for technical and artistic purposes. At the same time, Sketchpad was one of the first programs to introduce the Graphical User Interface (GUI) (Myers et.al 4). Two years after creating the revolutionary

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computer program, in 1965, the graphics pioneer conceived the first head mounted display which he termed ‘the Ultimate Display’ (Fig. 2): “The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display was to represent the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves” (Sutherland, A head-mounted 757). With this, Sutherland created a framework which many developers used to immerse users in computer generated environments instead of peering in through a narrow window (Biocca and Levy 3). Although the apparatus was hanging from the ceiling and the displays consisted of wire frames, three-dimensional models could be displayed and the user’s position could be changed to get different perspectives thanks to the tracking of head movement. The illusion of three-dimensionality created by Sutherland’s first display took advantage of the way we are accustomed to seeing our view of the world, just like Sir Charles Wheatstone’s stereoscope well over a hundred years ago (Rheingold 106). Sutherland defined the notion of ‘virtual environments’ in a speech held at the International Federation of Information Processing Congress in 1965, as computer generated worlds displayed through graphics on the screen (Sutherland, A head-mounted 763). He explained that the increased immersion he was aiming for could be achieved through making use not only of the human visual sense but also through the ears and the sense of feel as well. Rheingold explains that:

Sutherland wanted to use all the channels for communicating with the human being that the mind already knows how to interpret. The way human beings express themselves with physical objects, pushing and pulling manipulating with their hands appeared to be one of the most important parts in the immersion in virtual environments. (Rheingold 39)

Sutherland explained that it should be possible to develop software, wherein the virtual world would look, feel, and sound as much as possible like a real world to the human mind, which could then be displayed through the head mounted display (Sutherland, A head-mounted 763). This orchestrated marriage of hard- and software is to this day used as one of the key components to a more immersive experience.

In the book Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, Frank Biocca and Mark Levy question if “virtual reality technology is the first step towards the ultimate display” or even “the Ultimate Communication medium” (7). Some of the pioneers of virtual reality have heralded virtual reality as the ultimate form of interaction between humans and machines and the first medium that does not narrow the human spirit (Rheingold 156). Although these opinions can, to some extent, be perceived as somewhat exaggerated, Mark Zuckerberg thinks that virtual reality is going to change the way we will feel present in another place with other people. Sutherland envisioned that “The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the

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computer can control the existence of matter” (Sutherland, The ultimate display 506). In the mid-1970s, Myron W. Krueger a programmer and computer artist attempted to revolutionize how humans interacted with machines by creating a new kind of experience he termed ‘artificial reality’ (Wardrip-Fruin 377). Now not just the computer could control the existence of matter in this room, but the user(s) as well. Krueger’s artificial reality was based on a responsive environment and was presented as the basis for a new aesthetic medium based on real-time interactions between men and machines (Krueger, Responsive environments 386). Although Krueger’s responsive environment was not based on the head-mounted display principle Sutherland developed, but consisted of a projector-based virtual reality system, he did continue in the direction where previously Morton Heilig’s ‘Sensorama’ explored artificial reality in the context of next-generation cinematic experiments (Krueger, Responsive environments 377).

Fig. 1 Sensorama (Mortonheilig), Fig. 2 The Ultimate Display (Sutherland, The Ultimate Display), Fig. 3 VIDEOPLACE (Krueger, Responsive environments)

Krueger, in Responsive Environments, states that, usually, interaction between man and machine is limited to making use of their fingers or input options such as pens, and that he was dissatisfied with such a restricted dialogue (382). In his research, he therefore explored more interesting forms of interaction, which resulted in a concept he called responsive environment. In this environment the computer responds intelligently to the actions of users through complex graphics and sounds (383). With his project VIDEOPLACE (Fig. 3), Krueger created a conceptual environment with no physical existence which united people in separate locations in a common visual experience. The project allowed people to ‘communicate and interact’ through the video medium (384). Krueger compared VIDEOPLACE with a telephone conversation, where there is a sense of being together although touch and sight are not possible. VIDEOPLACE however, amplifies this sense of being together by including vision, physical dimension and a new interpretation of touch to communication methods. VIDEOPLACE consisted of two or more identical environments which could be adjacent or hundreds of miles apart. In each environment, a single person walked into a darkened room

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where he found himself confronted by an 8 by 10 feet rear-view projection screen. On the screen the persons saw their own life-size image and the image of one or more other people. All the persons were in the room by themselves, the other people represented on the screens were in other environments. The participants could interact with each other through physically moving around in the room. Their images, freed from physical constraints, could be moved, rotated, shrunken, or pasted together in various ways. Because of this, the full capability of video processing could be used to communicate and interact with other people (384), making it one of the first (virtual reality) technologies to enable geographically separated users to communicate with each other through speech and graphical visualizations. A similar project was conducted at Xerox PARC in the late 1980s; PARC called it Electronic co-presence. One wall of a room at PARC showed the video view of a room at another Xerox research facility in Oregon. People would schedule meetings, or they would just wander into their respective ends of the two-way, full-time, shared video space, and start a conversation (127). Art and research projects like Krueger’s VIDEOPLACE and PARC’s Electronic co-presence, involving the ability to use multiple senses for communication, showed that besides verbal communication, non-verbal communication through graphical visualizations were possible as well.

Although much research into the first virtual reality systems was done by computer scientists such as Sutherland and Krueger, important work in the virtual reality field -other than applications for computer science- was done by the University of North Carolina (UNC), which used virtual reality technologies as a scientific visualization aid (Fig. 4). A dedicated group was conducting research into virtual reality since the late 1960s mainly focusing on the development of ‘medical and pharmaceutical imaging projects’. Virtual reality technologies allowed them to amplify human perception and cognition and opened the opportunity for better research in the field (Bertol et al. 80). For this amplification the scientists used input devices which made use of force feedback to extend even more of their senses. This combination of virtual reality and input device greatly increased productivity by acting as an interface between the scientist and its object of study (81).

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Not long after, in 1977, Apple released its Apple II, an 8-bit personal computer which turned out to be one of the first highly mass-produced microcomputer products (Fig. 5). Almost simultaneously, Atari Inc., was at its top, famous for creating arcade videogames. After broadening their product range from arcade games to home computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s the introduction of the Atari 800 (Fig. 6), and systems like the Apple II, heralded a new era for consumers. They were now able to own their own relatively affordable computer and, even more special, work on it without it requiring them to have a degree in computer-engineering. Groundbreaking software applications such as VisiCalc, which was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, were being released. Although the original idea of Sutherland was to introduce virtual reality systems to increase the way in which mind and machine work together more efficiently, a real breakthrough here came at the start of the 1980s when the first personal computers that offered GUI’s were being produced. With the development of the GUI, 2D human-computer interfaces allowed users to make use of input devices such as the mouse as a 3D pointing device, instead of specifying a document or a program by typing in a command code, the mouse made it possible to interact with a computer by using a natural gesture. This decreased the popularity of the big, clunky and expensive virtual reality head mounted displays immensely (74). With the introduction of the world wide web in the early 1990s, the personal computer could -through the internet- now be used as a global information space, accessible for virtually anyone (Berners-Lee 461). This in stark contrast to the virtual reality technologies which were still far from being available to the public. Most of the companies developing virtual reality in the 1990s were small start-ups concentrated on the west coast of the U.S. Although large telecommunication companies such as U.S. West and NYNEX were interested in virtual reality technologies, none of them made a substantial investment since the emerging virtual reality market was not yet big enough (Biocca and Levy 27). Developments in virtual reality as communication medium were therefore mostly research related.

In the late 1980s training related technologies were developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View (Laurel 2). It was there that a human interface researcher, a cognitive scientist, an adventure-game programmer and a small group of home inventers created the first ‘affordable’ virtual reality prototypes (Rheingold 129). Up until then, virtual reality systems were incredibly expensive to produce and the technologies of the time did not make it any easier. The system developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center bore a strong resemblance to the head mounted display developed 25 years earlier by Sutherland and were mostly constructed with off the shelf parts (Fig. 7) (164). It turned out that LCD displays from portable televisions could substitute for one of the most expensive components. As with the development of the ARPANET in the early 1970s, the development of virtual reality systems played an important role in the US military. Although the reason for the development of the

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ARPANET as a network designed for military command and control against nuclear threats is still subject to debate (Leiner et al. 23), its other purpose –as a tool to improve military tactical and management decision making and to expand the horizon of networked infrastructures– (Lukasik 6) shows that the US military was looking to improve and speedup often expensive ways of communication and control. Virtual reality technologies however, were not used by the US military to ‘improve or speedup ways of communication and control’ but reduced costs significantly as starting pilots and future astronauts would no longer have to train in real fighter planes but could use a virtual reality simulator developed by NASA which showed how well the medium was capable of replicating the real world (Laurel 2). In her working paper What is Virtual Reality, Brenda Laurel describes that the first example she saw of immersive virtual reality was in 1987 at NASA’s Ames Research Center where “I felt myself to be immersed in a virtual world in which I could take action.” (2). Howard Rheingold writer of the book ‘Virtual Reality’ visited NASA Ames Research a year later in December 1988. At that time, NASA made use of Lycra gloves, lined with sensors running down the back, which translated finger-motions into a stream of digital snapshots and transported the data to a computer (133). Because of the gloves, Rheingold was able to see a digital representation of his hand in the virtual environment. As cockpits became increasingly complicated, technologies like the Lycra gloves enabled NASA to improve their flight simulator and make them more sophisticated and realistic (Biocca and Levy 27).

Fig. 7 NASA (NASA), Fig. 8 DataGlove (Scientific American), Fig. 9 Reality Built for Two (The Verge)

Many companies developed input devices like sensor-equipped wired gloves at the time, but the Lycra glove used in NASA’s virtual reality system was developed by a company named VPL Research Inc. Tom Zimmerman and Jaron Lanier founded the company in 1985 after they both left Atari Lab (Zimmerman et.al 189). Three years earlier, the Atari Sunnyvale Research Laboratory was established to explore future development in the digital entertainment industry. It operated for only two years as the video game crash of 1983 –which was a massive

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recession of the video game industry– had taken its toll (Izushi and Aoyama 1850). Revenues had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then plummeted to around $100 million by 1985, a decline of more than 95%. When Zimmerman told Atari about the Glove, they offered him $10,000. He refused the offer, and developed a more refined version with the help of engineer Young Harvill and Lanier, nowadays known as the ‘DataGlove’ (Fig. 8). Although Zimmerman played an important role in VPL, it is Lanier who is often revered to as the ‘inventor’ of virtual reality. Lanier was characterized by his drive towards more creativity and accessibility in virtual environments (Lanier, You are not 71). He got the idea that he could create an entirely new computer language, one that could not only be used by experts but was accessible for everyone. The concept was that instead of dry alphanumeric codes, beautiful images and sounds were used to program. This same use of images and sounds is something of which Lanier thinks that can have a profound impact on the way we communicate through virtual reality (Scientific American). However, Lanier and Zimmer did not limit themselves to gloves. After the NASA glove and the initial marketing successes of the DataGlove, VPL started working on a commercial version of the virtual reality head mounted display which they called EyePhones. Even though virtual reality systems now became commercially available, extremely high costs of the systems ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 meant that only a limited number of companies could afford the technology (Rheingold 135). The EyePhone consisted of 2 colour LCD monitors viewed using a LEEP optical system (Blanchard et al. 3). Stereoscopic cues and proprietary diffusion techniques were used to merge the pixels of the LCD into a continuous image and to reduce conflicts between depth of field. The monitors and optics were mounted in a soft, counter-weighted headdress which according to Lanier had physical and psychological advantages over the more rigid and intimidating helmets NASA used. The techniques were later applied in their ‘Reality Built for Two’ system (Fig. 9) which was one of the first systems that enabled more than one user to share a virtual space through head mounted display. The user’s body movements were translated into the virtual environment via the tracking of the DataGlove and EyePhones and represented by an avatar (Blanchard et al. 35). The design developed by VPL is still applied in that of the Oculus Rift today, and between 1988 and 1990, VPL was the “gloves and goggles” vendor, the first vendor of “off-the-shelf” VR systems, supplying mainly to universities and the military (Rheingold 165) With the introduction of the Nintendo Power Glove in 1989, VPL even managed to get their technology into popular gaming culture for a low cost compared to the $6300 DataGlove (134). One year later in 1990, VPL Research however, filed for bankruptcy because of the technology was not yet ready for consumers. Its patents were eventually sold in 1999 to Sun Microsystems (Lanier, Sun Buys VPL).

Thus far, I have shown a wide variety of developments and purposes for virtual reality across different fields such as cinema, computer science, the medical and pharmaceutical

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industry, the military, the digital entertainment industry and the communications industry. Although the first development of virtual reality dates back to the early 1950s it was not until the late 1970s that the first research into the technology as a communication medium was conducted by the likes of Krueger and 10 year later Xerox PARC. Both VIDEOPLACE and Electronic co-presence consisted of physical rooms where the visualisations of other people were displayed on large projector screens. This meant, that if the researchers wanted to expand their network, an entirely new physical room had to be arranged. In the early 1990s this changed when with the Reality Built for Two system made by VPL, the space of the room was no longer a physical affair but a virtual one. The technologies of the time however were still far too expensive for both consumers and companies, and as the market was not yet big enough, telecommunication companies were hesitant to invest in the technology (Biocca and Levy 27). Except for the research done by Krueger, Xerox PARC and VPL with their Reality Built for Two system, little developments were being conducted into virtual reality as a communication medium. In the 1980s and 1990s it was heralded as the ultimate communication medium by virtual reality pioneers such as Krueger and Lanier (Biocca and Levy 7). However, it was not until 2012, when Luckey revealed his $300 Oculus Rift, that virtual reality as a communication medium got a new impulse again from its owner Facebook.

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3 Facebook and the Oculus Rift

With over 1.5 billion people logging in to their Facebook accounts, Facebook is the largest social network site in the United States and in Europe, with the highest penetration among Internet users (Statista, Number of Facebook). Platforms like Facebook enable people to make connections by sharing expressive and communicative content. The widespread presence of Facebook enables users to allocate many of their social activities to the online environment (Van Dijck 4). In VIDEOPLACE, Krueger managed to create a connection between his virtual environments allowing users to interact with each other and the environment (Krueger 384). This preconceived connection however, did not enable the same possibilities for online connections as technologies such as Facebook do today. According to Facebook, their mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” (Facebook), which means that in order to achieve this objective, communicative tools are offered by Facebook which enable their users to connect and share their experiences. According to José van Dijck, the sharing of content enhances connectedness between people (35). Connectedness can be seen as “human interaction on an individual and community level” (Van Dijck 4). Many social media platforms embraced the notion of ‘connectedness’ which nurture connections, build communities, advance democracy, and enable users to create and share content through the layers of their platforms. However, with the rapid growth of social media platforms such as Facebook, companies started to appear less interested in their users and communities, and more interested in the data they create. With the introduction of automated forms of interaction or connectivity, features such as the ‘Like Button’ plugin (which sends valuable user data to Facebook every time a user ‘likes’ something) (Gerlitz, Helmond 5), enabled Facebook to algorithmically gather and process large quantities of data both from and outside of its platform (Van Dijck 4). Where virtual reality technologies such as ‘VIDEOPLACE’ and ‘Reality Built for Two’ connected two or slightly more people through virtual reality, Facebook seems to want to make virtual reality social, as the name of their Oculus application ‘Social VR’ implies.

3.1 Social, and the degree of social presence

According to Van Dijck, the meaning of social in social media platforms, seems to both encompass “(human) connectedness and (automated) connectivity” (12). As Facebook is now owner of Oculus, this raises the question if Van Dijck’s meaning of ‘social’ will also be applied by Facebook to Social VR and the Rift as a communication platform, something I will explore in the case study about Facebook’s Social VR demo. However, social seems to play an important

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role for Facebook as they explain that ‘Virtual reality has the potential to be more social than any other platform.” (Newsroom, F8). But what makes virtual reality more social compared to social networking sites?

In Users of the world, Unit! Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein categorize social media based on the degree of social presence it allows (61). Every type of social interaction people have is influenced by their will to regulate the impression others have of them. (Goffman, in Kaplan 62). For example, this is done by making a good impression and creating an image that is consistent with one’s identity (images on a Facebook profile). “Usually, such a presentation is done through self-disclosure; that is, the conscious or unconscious revelation of personal information (e.g., thoughts, feelings, likes, dislikes) that is consistent with the image one would like to give.” (Kaplan and Haenlein 62). However, Kalplan and Haenlein assume that a second classification can be created “based on the degree of self-disclosure it requires and the type of self-presentation it allows.” (62). By combining the two, they created a classification of social media (Table 1).

Social presence/ Media richness Low Medium High

Self-presentation/ High Blogs Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook)

Virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life)

Self- disclosure Low Collaborative Projects (e.g., Wikipedia) Content communities (e.g., YouTube)

Virtual game worlds (e.g., World of

Warcraft)

Table. 1 Classification of Social Media by social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure. (Kaplan and Haenlein 62)

When looked at social presence and media richness, this classification shows that (often text based) collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia score the lowest. While social networking sites such as Facebook, are in the middle enabling (in addition to text) the sharing of pictures, videos and other forms of media. Virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, score the highest, as they, according to Kaplan and Haenlein, try to replicate real life encounters such as face-to-face communication. The biggest difference comes when the virtual social world and virtual game worlds are compared in the light of self-presentation/self-disclosure. In virtual game worlds like World of Warcraft, a lower level of self-disclosure is required as they are ruled by strict guidelines such as choosing classes (warriors, mages,

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rogues) or other paths that decide the destiny of the user (62). Virtual social worlds such as Second Life, allow the user to choose their own path and choose how and as who they want to be perceived (a topic which I cover in greater detail in in my discussion on the ‘virtual’, ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the avatar’ in chapter 5). That virtual social worlds such as Second Life create substantially more social presence/media richness compared to Facebook, might be one of the reasons for Facebook to expand their services through the Oculus Rift.

3.2 Facebook’s new platform

Ever since Facebook acquired Oculus in the spring of 2014, Zuckerberg has described virtual reality as the “social platform” of the future—as the way we will not only play games and watch movies, but also how we actually interact with each other (FB Q415). In an Interview with the Verge, Cory Ondrejka –the co-creator of the immensely popular (social) virtual world Second Life who is now VP of engineering at Facebook– explains that he introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Oculus. According to Ondrejka, virtual reality creates completely new ways of sharing experiences, by letting you share a sense of place and presence, and moving past the things we are used to with what we can share from our smartphone (Schnipper). He continued that the opportunity to be able to partner with the team of the Oculus Rift, that created an affordable, well-functioning virtual reality headset, which is part of a platform that enables communication, creativity and expression, is right in the middle of their mission “focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences” (Zuckerberg,

Oculus VR)

. Ondrejka was also asked if virtual reality is going to

bring people closer together or push them further apart (Schnipper). He explained that virtual reality will enable people to connect and feel like they are really ‘there’ with other people, for example, people can capture the places they love to be and share it with their friends through 360-degree video. A new experience compared to the text and videos you will get from products such as Facebook’s social network, Instagram or WhatsApp today.

Since its inception, Facebook has acquired more than 50 companies including billion dollar deals such as communication platforms for mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service Instagram in 2012 and more recently instant messaging client WhatsApp in 2014 (Newsroom, Facebook to Acquire). When Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004, the initial years of the platform development were mostly focused on the development for web (Goggin 4). They later expanded their services to smartphones, when in October 2007, they launched their fully fledged mobile platform ‘Facebook Platform for mobiles’ right after the introduction of the first iPhone (4). Facebook’s transition to mobile strengthened their position as a “mass social media platform”, gaining popularity across countries outside North-America and Europe (5). In 2016, of the 1.09 billion daily active users,

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over 989 million are accessing Facebook via mobile (Newsroom, company info). Although according to Zuckerberg “to make the world more open and connected”, Facebook still has a lot more to do on mobile, at this moment they are in a position that they can start “focusing more on what platforms will come next” (Zuckerberg,

Oculus VR

). At the F8 conference on

April 12 2016, Zuckerberg for the first time showed a technology roadmap which detailed the ways in which “technologies will help bring people together and give everyone a voice” (Fig. 10) (Newsroom, F8).

Fig. 10 Facebook 10-year technology roadmap. (Newsroom, F8)

Virtual reality occupies a prominent place within this technology roadmap, dividing the section VR/AR into: Mobile VR, Rift, Touch, Social VR and AR Tech. Besides Oculus’ hardware technologies such as: Mobile VR, Rift and Touch, Facebook also distinguishes Social VR, the software application of which they gave a demonstration that same F8 conference. For Facebook, virtual reality and specifically their Oculus Rift platform, seems to consist out of both hard- and software. This raises certain questions about the definition of virtual reality which I will explore by analyzing a set of virtual reality characteristics and understandings.

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4 Oculus Rift: hard- or software

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan famously proposed that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study (7-21). From McLuhan’s standpoint a medium impacts human experience and society through its formal and technical properties (4). In line with the Mcluhanesque vision, virtual reality, just as any medium, is designed to extend the human sensorium. However, virtual reality cannot be defined solely through McLuhan’s understanding of media. As Biocca and Levy explain “If VR consists of a hardware system, where do we look to identify a single virtual reality? Examining the technological apparatus alone does not seem adequate for this purpose.” (34). In his article Artificial Reality Krueger defines virtual reality as follows:

The terms virtual worlds, virtual cockpits, and virtual workstations were used to describe specific projects. In 1989, Jaron Lanier, CEO of VPL, coined the term virtual reality to bring all of the virtual projects under a single rubric. The term therefore typically refers to three-dimensional realities implemented with stereo viewing goggles and reality gloves. (Krueger xiii)

Not everyone within the scientific community however liked the phrase coined by Lanier. At MIT, the University of North Carolina, and NASA they felt that the pop culture phrase was just a sexy term for TV, magazines and the newspaper (Rheingold 126). Researchers considered that their work could better be described in terms such as ‘virtual environments’ or ‘simulation’ (Biocca and Levy 4), which, as I outlined in chapter 2 ‘A history of virtual reality’, may have to do with the fact that many technologies differentiated substantially from each other. Although it seems that the use of the term virtual reality held up, the term itself is still often described rather abstract. Sherman and Craig describe virtual reality as:

a medium composed of interactive computer simulations that sense the participant's position and actions and replace or augment the feedback to one or more senses, giving the feeling of being mentally immersed or present in the simulation. (Sherman and Craig 13)

They explain that the definition they present is “both narrow enough to discard many misleading uses of the term virtual reality and broad enough to include the wide variety of devices used by practitioners of the medium.” (14). Even though the definition of the term virtual reality seems to change over time and is often described abstract, it includes the notion of both hard- and software. To still be able to describe virtual reality, researches often break

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up the term into a set of characteristics instead of one solid definition (Sherman and Craig, Heim, Laurel). By delving deeper into these characteristics of virtual reality, I can shed light on how the Oculus Rift can be positioned as a new communication platform through its hard- and software.

4.1 The characteristics of virtual reality

In The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim suggests that virtual reality can be described in terms of seven different characteristics: simulation, interaction, artificiality, immersion, full-body immersion, telepresence and networked communications (110) These characteristics are necessary for the Oculus Rift to increase the way in which people will feel like they are, what Zuckerberg calls, “actually present in another place with other people” (Zuckerberg, Oculus VR).

4.1.1 The immersion model

Heim explains that for simulation it is necessary to recreate an imitation of the real world, which can, for example, be achieved through realistic use of images and sound. Interaction, in turn, enables users to interact with these imitations. This can be as seemingly uncomplicated as throwing a digital file in the trashcan of your computer or as extensive as altering the virtual environment itself. Artificiality, according to Heim, are virtually constructed spaces where interaction with the world is possible and allow for a better immersion. Both immersion and full-body immersion are related to the degree to which the user will feel part of the environment either partially through vision and hearing, or their full-body (112). Telepresence refers to the effect felt when controlling real world objects from a distant location, as well as the effect people feel when they are aware of what's going on, and are able to accomplish tasks with, and immerse themselves in virtual reality or virtual environments (114). In academia telepresence is now often replaced by the shorter ‘presence’ (Sheridan 120). Heim calls these six topics the immersion model, since they all contribute to user immersion by extending the senses (Heim 114).

At Facebook’s F8 conference on April 13 2016, Zuckerberg announced that at Facebook’s recently established Social VR team, they are working on challenges that involve combining a ‘sense of presence’ with the ability to ‘interact with the environment’ and ‘communicating through body language’ as well as ‘voice’ (Newsroom, F8). For Facebook creating presence is important, as it is the degree to which users will feel part of the virtual environment. Since immersion and presence are closely related to one another, and an

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understanding of the terms is necessary for the case study I will explore about Facebook’s ‘Social VR demo’, I will discuss both terms more extensively in the next chapters.

4.1.2 Extending the senses: Immersion

In 1962 Marshall McLuhan envisioned that

The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopaedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind. (McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy 158)

In virtual reality the extension of the consciousness and of the senses is essential to creating convincing immersion. Immersion is the degree to which the user will feel part of the environment. This feeling is caused by several factors: isolation from the outside environment, the perception of the user in the environment, the perception of movement of the user and through natural, logical ways of interaction (Witmer and Singer 227). Immersion can be solely a mental state or can be accomplished through physical means: physical immersion is a defining characteristic of virtual reality and is often achieved by synthetic stimulus of the body’s senses. Mental immersion, in addition, creates a state of being deeply engaged and a suspension of disbelief. This is generally accomplished through visualization and is probably the goal of most media creators such as video game developers (Sherman and Craig 7). These factors ensure that the user appears to be more in the virtual environment (instead of just watching around) and are therefore almost exclusively found in virtual reality. Although immersion can be achieved through mental or physical means, for the Oculus rift, interaction with the device is always necessary.

The interaction between technical devices and the human sensorium have, according to McLuhan, always had a profound impact on human social life (4). Although McLuhan has often been accused of being a technical determinist, the social impact of the immersion through virtual reality head mounted displays raised several questions back in the 1980s with the development of the first generation. Jaron Lanier wrote in his manifesto You are not a Gadget how experimental digital gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, can have profound consequences on the experiences of the persons who are using it. Changing the height of a user’s avatar in virtual reality for example can transform their esteem and social self-perception (Lanier, you are not 6). Because of this, Lanier was often asked if the technologies

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he was working on, like virtual reality, “might unleash the demons of human nature. Would the users become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live?” (7). Although some of these questions were found silly by Lanier, others were prescient. In the United States, burn patients are being helped to escape the pain of burn injuries by immersing them in the virtual reality of a video game during treatment. The video game enabled the patients to divert their presence to that of the virtual environment of the video game instead of the procedure.

4.1.3 Creating presence

According to Bob G. Witmer and Michael J. Singer in Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire, the feeling of presence is created by two factors: involvement and immersion. Involvement is the degree to which the user feels involved, and is caused by the focusing on a coherent set of stimuli. This coherence allows the users to be more involved with his or her surroundings. The increased degree of focus and coherence therefore increases the involvement and thus more presence. However, involvement is not only tied to virtual environments and can be perceived by reading books, watching a movie or a play (227).

Presence can be defined as the subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another, as the example of burn patients showed (Witmer and Singer 226). In Being There: The Subjective Experience of Presence, Carrie Heeter suggests that there are three kinds of presence that are the key components for a convincing virtual experience: personal, environmental and social presence (262-271). Through personal presence, the user experiences the virtual environment as if he or she actually is there. This can be enhanced by environmental presence which indicates how the virtual environments respond on the user’s actions and behaviors. Can the users, for instance, manipulate the world or are the laws of physics comparable with real-life? And the last, and for this research the most import one, is social presence. Social presence means, that the presence of other people, automatically creates a more convincing presence for the user (267). This can be as simple as connectivity tools that indicate the presence of friends such as ‘friend lists’ or ‘leaderboards’ or as extensive as an actual visual representation of the user trough, for example, an avatar. Networked communications are therefore essential for the Oculus Rift as it enables it to connect people and increase social presence.

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4.1.2 Networked communications

In the ‘immersion model’ Heim deliberately left out networked communications because according to him and virtual reality pioneers such as Jaron Lanier, networked communications are equally as important as the immersion model since it brings connectivity into virtual reality (116). Networked communications, for example, enable the Oculus Rift platform to let geographically separated users inhabit the same virtual space. Users of the Oculus Rift can eventually connect with existing Facebook friends and play games or strike up a conversation through Oculus Home (Healey). Although from this perspective it seems that virtual reality is a good candidate for a new communications medium, what are the characteristics that set apart the platform from, for example, communication platforms such as Facebook’s social network or their other products?

4.2 The use and misuse of the term virtual reality: a medium in flux

In her recent working paper What is Virtual Reality from April 2016, Laurel describes in specific terms the formal and structural aspects of virtual reality through some of its core characteristics. According to her, the term virtual reality has been used and misused in the past and she sees the same trend returning with the launch of the Oculus Rift. She explains that for example 360-degree immersive video and games such as Second Life are often described as virtual reality while they are not. In virtual reality a participant must have affordances for moving about in the scene, take action in the world and perceive the consequences, something which 360-degree video does not offer (3). Although Second Life does offer these affordances, the game is designed for use on two-dimensional displays, and can therefore inherently not be described as virtual reality as it does not enable a complete surround environment for the user (2). She continues that the application of the term virtual reality to CAVE experiences such as Myron Krueger’s ‘VIDEOPLACE’ and Xerox PARC’s ‘Electronic co-presence’ are questionable (2). Although I believe that virtual reality is a medium in flux and no solid definition can be applied to it, characteristics that Laurel and Heim use however, create a detailed description of the medium (both from a hard- and software perspective), while leaving room for interpretation. In her working paper, Laurel created a list of core characteristics of virtual reality which will act as a recurring theme during this platform study to research the Oculus rift as a new communication platform (Table 2).

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The core characteristics Virtual Reality 1. A complete surround environment.

2. Affordances for depth perception and motion parallax. 3. Spatialized audio, not just stereo.

4. Affordances for tracking the participant’s direction of motion distinct from the direction of gaze.

5. The only “camera” is the participant’s sensorium. 6. Natural gesture and movement.

7. Affordances for narrative construction. 8. The principle of action.

Table. 2 Some of the core characteristics virtual reality. (Laurel 2-3)

By now, I have given a detailed description considering Oculus’ position within Facebook and the meaning of ‘social’ in social virtual reality. I discussed why virtual reality can be perceived as both a hard- and software system, and I explored the key characteristics and understandings of virtual reality. According to Laurel, “The definitive goal” of virtual reality is “achieving sensory immersion in a virtual environment, including a sense of presence”. In the next chapter I will therefore inquire how ‘the virtual’, in virtual environment, relates to the Oculus Rift as a new communication platform, and discuss its related the topics.

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5 The virtual: worlds, environments and reality

The virtual, although often co-opted to imply that virtual reality technology is involved, in the Deleuzian philosophy, can be seen as that which has a real existence even if it cannot be treated as a tangible object (Shield 284). The virtual therefore does not have to be perceived as the opposite of the real “instead it is a component of the experiencing of the real” (Farman 22). Meeting someone via virtual reality in a virtual environment can be so real that it alters the ways we “identify ourselves, the ways we use language, and the ways we conceive of everyday space” (22). The term virtual had many meanings such as virtue, force and power over the years and originated from the Latin word virtus (37) At the end of the 1950s it began to be used to describe computer simulated virtual environments where objects can exist virtually in that environment (Sherman and Craig 16). The term virtual environment is regularly used as a synonym for both virtual reality and virtual worlds and can be used ambiguous preventing confusion if for example virtual world is being used in relation to a digital space such as Second Life. In the 1980s researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Lab used the term virtual environment to describe an interface that allowed the user to enter a computer simulated scene through one of their virtual reality head mounted displays (Sherman and Craig 17). An interface occurs where two or more information sources come face-to-face, a remnant of the Greek word prosópon (Waite 56). The interface is therefore less an object but can perceived as a nexus between spaces (Farman 64). The Oculus Rift platform, with its layers of hard and- software, can for example be perceived as an interface to –one of the key understandings for this platform study (62)– cyberspace.

5.1 Cyberspace

Cyberspace is a term popularized by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer where he describes it as:

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. (41).

Although the concept of cyberspace is not the same as the virtual, it is however fundamentally woven in the history and use of virtual reality (Sherman and Craig 17). Made possible

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particularly by internet-mediated communication, cyberspace represented the ‘utopian’ virtual location for its users, a placeless-nes realm without imposed rules (Castells 385). It functions as a separate world freed from physical constraints (Rogers The end of the Virtual 2), enabling its inhabitants to take on their ‘own’ online identity and communicate.

Without its regard to physical geography, cyberspace enables users interconnect globally and can be seen as a place people inhabit (Farman 45). One of the first ways to interact in cyberspace was the computerized Bulletin Boards System. Later on, tabletop games such as Dungeons and Dragons inspired the creation of the first text based video games called Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) (59), which soon developed into chatrooms, forums and blogging sites (like LiveJournal, launched in 1999). Not long after that, the first social online games such as Ultima Online in 1997 and EverQuest in 1999 took off, which built on the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game genre (MMORPG). Eventually, one of the most extensive ways to interact in cyberspace came from a controversial MMORPG called Second Life (60). Launched in 2003 –around the same time as social networking sites such as Facebook– it was created to provide virtual spaces for people to interact trough avatars. However, where Second Life enabled users to manifest themselves through avatars in the ideology of cyberspace, Facebook on the other hand is tightly connected to our ‘real’ identity (Facebook Helpcentrum). Making the application of the term cyberspace to Facebook and its products and technologies questionable.

5.2 Avatar: interacting through a virtual body

One of the key notions of cyberspace, that you can be perceived as whoever or whatever you want, was one of the strengths Second Life brought with it through the use of avatars. When thinking about how social life is created online, and how communication takes place, the avatar is currently the most prevalent virtual representation of the user (Taylor 41). Generally, an avatar is a virtual-body and forms the graphical representation of the user or the users alter ego or character, but profile pictures and usernames are often considered as avatars as well. This means that –even with the Oculus Rift–an avatar has to be created in order to have a virtual-body to move around in virtual environments (Laurel 3), and communicate through body language, something that Facebook considers important for the Oculus Rift as a communication platform.

According to Slater and Wilbur an avatar of the user in virtual reality increases immersion and help ground the user in the virtual reality experience in comparison with displaying the user without a virtual-body (14). This means that the only camera is the participant’s sensorium and that any other point of view will not benefit the experience of virtual reality, making it a first-person medium (Laurel 3). Heeter seems to acknowledge this,

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by explaining that the avatar has a positive effect on the experience of perception. The virtual-body can mimic the movement of the virtual-body of the user in the physical world and displays this movement on the body in the virtual environment. This mimicking of body (parts) can only be achieved if input devices such as the Oculus touch controllers are being used, which transfer hand movement into the virtual environment. The user therefore perceives the body to be his or hers as the brain often fails to differentiate between computerized characters and human beings (Bailenson and Blascovich). When avatars are customizable they can change self-esteem and social self-perception (Kaplan 62). Taller avatars can make people behave more confidently; attractive ones can make them more social (Bailenson and Blascovich). However, not all avatars might have these benefits, as Facebook wants to create a ‘real life’ representation of the user with their Social VR demo. Despite this, one of the challenges Facebook’s Social VR team is working on involve communicating through body language. The avatar forms an essential component in this since, after all, it is hard to convey meaning through body language without a body.

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6 Communication through body language

Although a great deal of computer mediated communication is done verbally and Facebook’s Social VR team places great emphasis on voice, with the Oculus Rift Facebook places emphasis on another form of communication (Newsroom, F8). Nonverbal communication, and specifically face-to-face communication, is often revered to as the first known method of interaction known to all humans and is one the key methods through which people can communicate through the Oculus Rift for Facebook. From the day a human is born, nonverbal channels such as touching and reading facial cues are used and are one of the primary forms of communication (Palmer 282). Albert Mehrabia Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California has become known for his book Silent Messages from 1971 about the 7%-38%-55% rule, for the relative impact of words, tone of voice, and body language when speaking. According to him, 55% of the impact of communicating is being conceived through body language. Although verbal forms of communication can offer complex details and information, the most intimate messages are often carried out by tone of voice, facial expressions or body movement. Individuals may for instance nod with their heads if they agree to something, lean in to give a sense of involvement or cross their arms if they are reluctant creating a closed posture (Pease 58). Many theorist and researchers involved in computer mediated communication, generally acknowledge face-to-face communication to be the ideal form of interpersonal communication since it is learned and practiced throughout the lifetimes of humans (Palmer 290).

In Virtually There, Lanier describes how he is a frequent but reluctant user of videoconferencing. According to Lanier, human interaction has both verbal and nonverbal elements and videoconferencing seems to fail at effectively performing the latter. He continues to explain that it is nearly impossible to make proper eye contact and users are unable to position themselves relative to another having no clear way to direct attention, approval or disapproval (1). The answer to this problem, was a product called ‘Reality Built for Two’ that allowed participants to share a virtual environment through a virtual reality head mounted display and the VPL data glove input device. This enabled the users to have verbal and non-verbal face-to-face communication with another user in the virtual environment. Their bodies were represented by an avatar, mimicking their movement. Even though Lanier saw the limitations of video conferencing, current day Skype video calls are not any better, and on Facebook you can only hear and see nonverbal messages such as emoticons or other people’s profile pictures (Knapp, et al. 7). Although the Oculus Rift does not yet support eye tracking it (through the tracking of the user’s head position and angle) does enable users to focus their gaze on specific objects, simulating eye contact. One of the benefits that Facebook might therefore have with the Oculus Rift is that virtual reality will provide the traditional benefits of

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computer mediated communication by bringing people together across space and time and will, in addition, enable users to have real-time face-to-face communication, including those important non-verbal cues. Eventually, the Oculus Rift might even create a hyper-real communication environment, where, instead of our naturally acquired communication skills, we are using newer unknown forms of communication.

6.1 Post-symbolic Communication

The idea of hyper-real communication has been discussed by Lanier in an interview with Scientific American in 1997. Hyper-real communication or post-symbolic communication as Lanier calls it, might, according to him, eventually enable people to invent new forms of language or even something else entirely.

It's a new way to communicate, where people would directly create a shared world by programming it, by modeling it in real time, as opposed to merely using words, the intermediaries that we have to describe things. So it's like cutting out the middleman of words, and finding a new form of communication where you directly create shared reality--real-time, waking-state, improvised dreaming. (Lanier qtd. in Scientific American)

Although I find Lanier’s vision for the future of communication to be intriguing, Facebook shows that what they have in mind for the Oculus Rift as their new communication platform will initially be aimed at connecting people and create the ability to communicate through body language as well as voice using today’s technologies (Newsroom, F8). To see what the Oculus Rift makes possible as a communication platform, for the remainder of this research, I will therefore delve deeper into the hard- and software of the Oculus Rift and its developments.

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7 Methodology

To research the Oculus Rift as a communication platform more thoroughly, this research will make use of parts of the platform study methodology developed by Bogost and Montfort for the MIT Platform Studies series, leaning towards their first publication in that series Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Although they deliberately left the methodology of platform studies open and avoid prescribing a theoretical or critical approach (Apperley and Parikka 2), with Racing the Beam, Montfort and Bogost laid the foundations for a theoretical framework which they refer to as the ‘most neglected’ level in analyses of digital media: the platform (Leorke 257). In Rebranding the platform: The limitations of “platform studies” Dale Leorke argues that even though platform studies are only a relatively new concept, the MIT Platform Studies series relies too much on the framework developed by Montfort and Bogost in Racing the Beam. This research will therefore include additional approaches to the original MIT platform studies series framework.

7.1 Platform studies

According to Gillespie, a platform, from a computational perspective, must serve as an infrastructure to build applications on. Platforms can therefore vary from computer hardware, to software applications (349) or in the case of the Oculus Rift a marriage between the two. The goal of platform studies is to examine the relationships between the hard- and software design of a computing system (platform) and the creative works produced on that system (Montfort and Bogost 2). It allows for the investigation of how particular aspects of the platform influence the work done on and for the platform (4). Because of this, researchers are often under the impression that a platform study is all about technical details and, that you for example, have to know how to program to understand the platform (an ability not all media studies researchers possess). Although some technical understanding can be useful, platform studies mainly focus on the relation between technical details and culture.

A part of this research will therefore consist of a technical investigation into the computing technologies of the Oculus Rift and its peripherals, and explore how they can be understood in relation to what Facebook calls their ‘new communication platform’. It will thereby create awareness and discussion of how the platforms exists in a context of culture and society (Apperley and Parikka 2).

The Oculus Rift apparatus is fabricated in a way Gillespie observes as “technologies increasingly submerge their workings” which is done to both increase production efficiency and to prevent altering of the apparatus material structure (Gillespie 239). Although, for

Oculus Rift: A new communication platform.

Oculus Rift:

A new communication platform.

Abstract

Table of contents

1 Introduction

Oculus VR

2 A history of virtual reality

3 Facebook and the Oculus Rift

3.1 Social, and the degree of social presence

3.2 Facebook’s new platform

Oculus VR)

Oculus VR

4 Oculus Rift: hard- or software

4.1 The characteristics of virtual reality

4.1.1 The immersion model

4.1.2 Extending the senses: Immersion

4.1.3 Creating presence

4.1.2 Networked communications

4.2 The use and misuse of the term virtual reality: a medium in flux

5 The virtual: worlds, environments and reality

5.1 Cyberspace

5.2 Avatar: interacting through a virtual body

6 Communication through body language

6.1 Post-symbolic Communication

7 Methodology

7.1 Platform studies