The Room: design and embodiment of spaces as social beings
Abstract: This paper delves into the exploration of spaces as non-anthropomorphic avatars. We are investigating interaction with entities showing features different from humans’, to understand how they can be embodied as avatars and perceived as living, social beings. To push this investigation to its limit, we have designed as an avatar an interactive space (the Room), that challenges both the anthropomorphic structure, and most of the social interaction mechanisms we are used to. We introduce a pilot framework for the Room design, addressing challenges related to its body, perception, and interaction process. We present an implementation of the framework as an interactive installation, namely a real-time, two-player, VR experience, featuring the Room avatar, with a focus on haptic feedback as the main means of perception for the subject embodying the Room. By radically challenging anthropomorphism, we seek to investigate the most basic aspects of embodiment and social cognition.
Primary Subject Area: [Experience] Multimedia Applications
Secondary Subject Area: [Experience] Art and Culture
Relevance To Conference: The essence of ACM Multimedia lies in the comprehensive exchange of information through various mediums such as images, text, and audio, aiming to utilize our senses beyond traditional media consumption to create seamless experiences. In this sense, multimedia applications are attempting to “go back to the body”.
But we can do more than that: if properly leveraged, by altering the senses we can create the experience of completely new bodies. Our paper is a pilot study on an extreme, divergent take on non-anthropomorphic avatars, from the perspectives of embodiment and interaction: the body becomes a space, am entity that perceives mainly through tactile sensations. Can we “become” bodies so different from our own? What can its drives and desires be? How to effectively translate its affordances and perception? Can we understand each other if our bodies are transformed and verbal communication is absent? These are core, open issues in the research on Metaverse and immersive telepresence, at the center of the track on “Experience”. Moreover, it opens the discussion on the meaning of body and the self, becoming the theme of the interactive installation that we present, facing the challenge on how to communicate this theme to the audience.
Submission Number: 5633
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