Dissertation Proposal

October 12th, 2008

Here is my finished Dissertation Proposal I submitted by emailing to Geoff Cox, basically outlining the subject and direction of my final year dissertation.

Provisional Title:

How have the perceived boundaries between virtual worlds and reality become increasingly blurred?

Synopsis:

My specific interests and the broadest description of what I would like to research is the way in which people interact with each other, the interface and the underlying technology within virtual realities, while exploring the connection between the increasing importance (or perhaps acceptance) of such interaction and the intrinsically related development and advances in the relationship between human and hardware that facilitates such virtual interaction.

Therefore I have decided that my initial question might be “How have the perceived boundaries between virtual worlds and reality become increasingly blurred?” with the view to predicting how development in future systems and interfaces may further affect this.

I could start this by exploring the course taken by current interfaces (both hardware and software) to the stage they are at now and discussing why they have attributed to the breaking down of the barriers between what is conducted in the real world and a virtual one. For example I could show how the two most prevalent and important pieces of hardware for human interaction with a computer system, the keyboard and mouse, have been used successfully but not perfectly for virtual interaction and also contrast this against the way people have adapted their behaviour and skills in order to convey meaning beyond the hardware’s original scope.

My first experience with a computer was of one in the traditional sense of a standalone ‘personal computer’, where your interaction was limited to software that has obviously been crafted by another human, and a great deal of effort has been taken to make interfaces intuitive by drawing on the user’s extrinsic knowledge but this was really as far as a virtual experience could go. Therefore there was a clear distinction between this and reality. Connecting to the internet was only done if it were absolutely necessary, so the scope for virtual interaction with others was highly limited by the technology of the day, the primary means of communicating online being correspondence via emails or by those who could publish information to websites.

And yet I would find myself producing things for the sole purpose of sharing it with someone else, whether that be a level I created in a game and saved on a floppy disk to be play-tested by my friends, or taking apart HTML and JavaScript files to make my own experimental projects to be viewed from the perspective of the outside world.

Humans have spent an unimaginable length of time developing social skills so it seems only natural then that there is a desire to improve the way we can express ourselves within these new environments. Software is continually being developed or improved upon to allow computer systems to respond more appropriately to the reaction and mood of its user. This leads to ever more intuitive software design and natural interfaces.

Having remembered the concept from my first year, I’ve already looked at Birgitte Aga’s Teletouch project which allows two people in completely different locations to interact by actual touch in a limited but profound way.

There is also the work of Stellarc as a possible path of exploration, his pieces often challenging or pushing forwards the boundaries between humans as entities within a virtual space. Often these pieces do so because they are particularly close to direct human and hardware interaction.

Toyota have even produced a steering wheel for a concept car that responds by changing colour depending on the mood of the driver presumably by somehow measuring stress via the hands.