Vision in Virtual Reality

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"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe) writes René Magritte right under the depiction of a pipe in his 1929 painting “La trahison des images”. Artists and philosophers have long theorized about the differences between pictorial and visual spaces. Pictorial spaces are the ones we see when we look at a picture, onto a computer monitor or at the screen of a movie theatre. Visual space, in contrast, is what we see when we open our eyes to look out into the world in front of us. It is also what we experience in well-designed virtual realities.***The experiential difference is huge. When looking at a picture, we can understand the depicted space and spatial relations between the objects it contains. But we are not ourselves part of that space. In the real world, in contrast, our body occupies a defined location in the visual space that opens in front of us. We experience “presence” with significant consequences on how we encounter objects and particularly other people. It seems, in fact, that our visual system operates in two entirely different modes depending on whether it is dealing with visual space or with pictorial spaces. I use the terms “presence mode” and “picture mode” to refer to these two modes. Whether or not we are in presence mode seems to depend only to a very minor extent on factors that are under cognitive control, but is rather determined by perceptual factors. ***My goal is to characterize (a) the perceptual factors that determine which mode we are in, and (b) what perceptual, cognitive, and physiological consequences the visual mode has.***My methodology is heavily based on the use of head-mounted virtual reality (VR) technology. VR allows us to set up visual spaces. As in the real world, these visual spaces can also contain pictorial spaces. For instance, we can hang a picture on the wall of a virtual living room, or we can place a computer monitor on a virtual desk. Having full control over the stimuli delivered by the head-mounted display, we can identify the stimulus properties that determine whether it is interpreted in presence mode or in picture mode.***Using that technology, I will also look into how the visual mode affects the perception of other people, and how it influences people's responses to frightening, stressful situations. I expect that these effects are huge. Whether a young person plays a violent computer game on a screen or in VR might have very different impacts on their cognitive and emotional development. The success of training a medical student to cope with emergency situations, or of exposure therapy to alleviate a specific phobia in an anxiety patient probably also depends heavily on our understanding of vision in virtual reality.***The quickly expanding industries around virtual realities need experts who are at the same time fluent with the hardware and software involved in VR, who understand the human visual system inside out, and who are seasoned experimenters. I am training my students in all three areas.