Past,Present, and Future: Editorial on Virtual Reality Applications to Human Services

Abstract

“Virtual Reality” interventions in human services may include 360° video, augmented reality, mixed reality, and fully immersive 3-dimensional virtual reality simulations. A variety of applications have been evaluated in various fields of study, including medicine, social work, psychology, and human performance training. Currently, the state of research of VR interventions in human services has primarily focused on efficacy and effectiveness research, with few studies evaluating “scaling up” or implementation of VR interventions in larger populations. Unfortunately, the state of efficacy and effectiveness studies of VR interventions still remains weak with some applications due to smaller sample sizes, lack of randomized control trials, and a gap in reporting key intervention qualities, dosage, and outcomes. With new developments in combining artificial intelligence with VR, realism and the potential for human interaction with computer generated simulations may boost presence and immersion within these applications. This editorial provides an overview of the state of virtual reality applications in human service provision, potential gaps to be addressed by research in the future, and the development of AI based interactive sequences that may boost use presence.     

The Virtual Image Technology,Media, and Construction of the Visual Reality

We are experiencing a passage from the mostly representational function of images (the traditional media of photography, cinematography, television) to constructed images made with new technologies, especially computer graphics and virtual reality. We are left with images as formal abstractions, that make us think of a mediation of cognitive/ experiential models of reality, rather than a simple representative reproduction. With virtual reality the image presents itself more and more as reality, stressing its constructional statute. The image is no longer a map that orients the mental ways, but a real territory to explore.     

STRANGE YET STYLISH HEADGEAR VR consumption and the construction of gender

This article examines how gender is inscribed and reproduced in the consumption of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The focus is on how virtual reality systems become embedded in 'everyday life' through leisure and consumption, and how the spectacles and disciplines associated with consumption sites produce gendered virtual subjects. Studies of new communications technologies have tended to polarize between 'cyberpunk'/'cyberfeminist' visions of bodily transcendence in 'cyberspaces', and the critique of such visions from social theorists who focus on the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities through technical systems. These approaches tend to neglect the specific sites in which the social relations of VR are played out. A 'multi-sited' ethnographic study of immersive virtual reality systems is the basis for discussion of how virtual reality technologies produce gender in specific sites. Virtual systems are positioned and used differently in various locales such as arcades and art galleries, bars and theme parks and cafes. The article discusses the practices of consumption which (re)produce and maintain conventional bodily and subjective boundaries. What relationships are becoming institutionalized? Are new conventions of gender created in these consumption relationships? The construction of spectacle and space, and the specific bodily disciplines required for participation in virtual realities in locations of consumption is particularly important in the formation of gender dynamics. Multiple subject positions are offered through competing technical, economic and cultural practices in diverse sites. These positions can establish new conventions of virtual identities and experiences, but also remain shot through with familiar operational categories of gendered identities and bodily practices. This article argues that immersive virtual reality technologies cannot be understood without some consideration of the locales in which they are embedded, and the social identities they make possible or constrain. A local, reflexive and feminist orientation assists in understanding the gendered dynamics associated with 'becoming virtual'.     

360 Video: A prototyping process for developing virtual reality interventions

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technological intervention for anxiety disorders. However, there are no existing standards and best practices to evaluate the effectiveness of environments to achieve their intervention goals. The purpose of this study was to develop a VR intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder and test feasibility utilizing a three-stage development model. The development of a therapeutic VR environment may benefit from an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from various fields of study. Utilizing three stages of prototyping with two virtual reality platforms, fully immersive video (n?=?6) and three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual reality (n?=?8), the research team designed an intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder, testing bio-reactivity of participants. Results of prototyping include user feedback validating increased stress levels and increased bio-reactivity specifically in galvanic skin response and heart rate elevation. Implications include the use of 360° video for prototyping 3-D virtual reality interventions.     

Sociology after Humanism: A Lesson from Contemporary Science Studies

The field of science studies is the site of an explicit reflection on the ontological premises of sociology, with rival approaches defined by distinctive ways of specifying the basic constituents of reality. This article takes advantage of this debate to compare three types of ontological schemes in terms of their internal coherence and their consequences for sociology. Sociological humanism —represented by proponents of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK)—distinguishes between an immanent domain of social relations, a transcendent and meaningless material reality, and an intermediate, socially constructed level of knowledge, meaning, and culture. Symmetrical humanism —as found in the recent writings of Andrew Pickering—insists that society too should be placed among the constructions, thereby disqualifying it as a source of explanations for human agency and leaving a detached and self-moving human agent. The relational ontology —exemplified by the "actor-network" approach of Bruno Latour and others—makes no a priori distinctions between humans and others, or between transcendent reality and construction, treating these properties as outcomes. The two humanist approaches are found to be incoherent as ontological schemes and also, contrary to the assumptions of the current debate, inimical to sociological explanation. And contrary to the antisociological stance of the actor-network approach, it is found that the relational ontology provides a consistent basis for sociological explanations of human practices.     

Three-dimensional virtual reality: Applications to the 12 grand challenges of social work

Abstract

The American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) identified 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work to unify the profession with focused research, practice and policy applications for the most pressing social issues. Virtual Reality (VR), specifically three-dimensional immersive computer-generated environments, has a history of research and applications to address social and behavioral problems. VR is becoming more readily available, as the technology is becoming more common in mainstream platforms such as mobile technology. While social work interventions are often tailored for vulnerable populations that may not have access to VR computing, it appears that virtual reality is gaining accessibility with these advances. Within the framework of the 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work, researchers from three social work virtual reality laboratories in the United States, Texas State University, the University of Houston, and the University of Alabama, review applications previously tested and currently in development to focus future research and intervention in social work practice.     

The Cyber Worlds of Self‐Injurers: Deviant Communities,Relationships, and Selves

We explore how self‐injurers, a group of deviants who primarily were loners, now use the Internet to form subcultural and collegial relations. Drawing on virtual participant‐observation in cyber self‐injury groups, over eighty face‐to‐face and telephone in‐depth interviews, and over ten thousand e‐mail postings to groups and bulletin boards, we describe and analyze the online subcultures of self‐injurers. Via the Web, they have become cyber “colleagues,” simultaneously enacting two deviant organizational forms and challenging the idea that deviant loners can exist in a cyber society. We further analyze these individuals and their interactions to compare and contrast the venues that they use, the communities and relationships that they form, and their relation to real life. We contribute to symbolic interactionism through our social constructionist stance toward the creation of virtual communities and relationships, our focus on identity and stigma, our view of social organization as grounded in the panoply of human interpersonal relationships, our contrast of the competing reality claims posed by virtual as opposed to the solid world, and our discussion of the modern versus postmodern self.     

Mindscapes,ontology and global culture transition – 2: Morphogenesis as ‘personal ontology’

Abstract

<![CDATA[Clay Shirky's focus in his book, Here Comes Every-body, is on ‘the power of organizing without organizations’. The challenges from the book's focus and the title of his essay, ‘Ontology is overrated’, come at a time of crisis when practically all the institutions are now under critical public review and Lakoff's ‘new reality’ is reevaluating the roles of language, philosophy, logic and mathematics. Consequently, if Mindscape is considered, institutional ontology and personal ontology are divided into six categories, all antagonistic due to irreconcilable differences regarding priorities. Worst, people experience and define ‘reality’ differently under different circumstances and mindscape modes, depending on the state of their mindscape modes. The result is a multiverse, a global constellation of virtual realities. From some perspectives it would be reasonable to conclude, that the genome strategy presented here together with its implied paradigm merely compete with a host of other myths and metaphors for the imagination.]]>

<![CDATA[True, small world networks are organizing personal ontology in a multiverse of virtual individual realities. Even so, virtual realities do not imply arbitrary realities. All life as we know it is included in the genome's cluster gestalt strategy. Mapping of the human genome marks a turning point because a wrong choice is not an option. Morphogenesis as ontology suggests that the genome and ecology remain in sync by genome corrections that are often experienced as natural catastrophes. Ostensibly, the genome's cluster gestalt strategy consists of producing individual variants of the genome. Only those individuals that survive the dynamics of Earth's ecology and reproduce to continue to contribute code to the gene pool. There are species that reproduce by cloning, others by sexual reproduction. Humans and dogs are just two of countless species that cling desperately to an eventually to be incinerated rock in space.]]>     

The Culture of Surveillance

Postmodern cultural theory after Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard has tended to indict surveillance as a disciplinary apparatus, producing a society that is both carceral and increasingly virtual. At the same time, social critics like Lasch have decried the growth of narcissism amid the failure of liberalism. This essay aims to complicate both of these perspectives by examining the contradictory desire for surveillance in popular media like reality TV and in the social sciences themselves. It may be that the desire to watch and be watched is a more deeply rooted element of the liberal democratic impulse than we normally care to admit.     

Digital identities – overcoming visual bias through virtual embodiment

ABSTRACT

This study sheds new light on the role of identity in virtual environments when virtual representation of self is in support of disabled individuals and the potential impact of their virtual identity on work opportunities. It is widely understood that individuals who live with disability often experience a lifetime of bullying, exclusion, marginalization and rejection. They often experience workplace bias and discrimination. Yet, when they can create an identity and experience embodiment in virtual environments, the results can be extraordinarily powerful – even life-changing. This research builds on nearly a decade of ethnographic research in 3D online immersive social virtual worlds; seven of those years working with disability communities to answer the following: RQ1: In a virtual world where one can choose any avatar form, how does that visual sense of self-representation influence one’s ability to gain access to a social network, to be a leader in that network, and to find work? RQ2: How does realism in representation influence work experiences in these digital worlds? The results reveal the importance of choice in online representation of avatars in creating work and online social engagement. Implications contribute to our understanding of visual bias in the workplace and how emerging virtual reality technologies may open new avenues for meaningful work and social interactions for people with disabilities.     

From myth of return to return fantasy: a psychosocial interpretation of migration imaginaries

By referring to the myth of return, migration literature has focused mainly on sociopolitical explanations, neglecting intersubjective dynamics. This paper operates a switch from myth of return to fantasy. This allows the analysis to be detached from the return speculation’s outcome. It also recognises the cross-generational endurance of return-thinking as functional to the process of identity-building as part of a migrant’s search for well-being. Three British Pakistani migration stories will illustrate how return fantasies are not necessarily a symptom of disengagement with the host society, but are part of a common way human beings have to imagine possible futures for themselves and make sense of their present. Fantasies have the potential to create a virtual transitional space where the individual can re-elaborate experiences in a mode that is safer than the one of reality and may have a positive effect on normalising one’s migration experience.     

Ghostly Images,Phantom Discourses,and the Virtuality of the Global

The central premise of this article is that the conceptual terrain of the global is fundamentally unstable, that its content is far from determined. This opens the door to many different interpretations and uses of the term, where the referent is not so much to a pre-given reality, or even a tangible geographical space. Rather, the global constitutes its own content in the various fields in which it gets deployed, selectively affirming particular images and representations, while denying, repressing, or otherwise excluding others. I draw on the early history of film to argue that the global is a virtual distribution of value and intelligibility, where its images and signs no longer ‘represent’ an independent reality, but actually shape and transform the inter-subjective experiences of its virtual subjects. I use a recent documentary film on call centers in India to demonstrate how distinct regimes of cinematic images enable different kinds of interventions into these virtual distributions, revealing the global as a richly imagined terrain of discourses and representations, which are always already subject to re-distribution.

El argumento principal de este artículo es que en el ámbito conceptual, lo global es fundamentalmente inestable, aún falta mucho para determinar su contenido. El término global tiene muchas interpretaciones y usos variados, dado que el referente no aplica a una realidad preestablecida ni corresponde a un espacio geográfico tangible. El término global constituye su propio contenido en los diferentes campos en los cuales es utilizado, aseverando imágenes y representaciones particulares selectivas, mientras que a la vez niega, reprime, o excluye otras. Me inspiro en los comienzos de la historia del cine para argumentar que lo global es la distribución virtual del valor y de la ininteligibilidad, donde las imágenes y los letreros ya no “representan” una realidad independiente, sino que forman y transforman las experiencias inter-subjetivas de sus sujetos virtuales. Utilizo un documental fílmico reciente sobre los “call centers” de la India para demostrar cómo diferentes regímenes de imágenes fílmicas permiten diferentes tipos de intervenciones a estos distribuidores virtuales, que revelan lo global como un rico imaginario de discursos y representaciones que siempre han sido y son sujetas a una re-distribución.

     

Pole Pole Watamu — Langsam, langsam, weißer Mann!

?Time“ is an invention of man and as well as space it is a principal tool for organizational purposes, and it is necessary to find consensus about it. In the age of virtual reality it becomes more and more unnecessary to maintain a structure of space and time. Therefore, methods of group dynamics become more important that help to establish ?time-consensus“.     

What is Real in the Age of Virtual Reality?“Retraining” Frame Analysis for a Technological World

How do social actors determine what is really happening and what is not? This distinction, analyzed in such depth by Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis, now requires further analysis as technologies such as virtual reality become ever more affordable and available, transforming many aspects of everyday life and, inevitably, the definition of the “real” experience itself. This article considers the ways that experience is generated and organized in modern social life, arguing that a “refraining” of frame analysis and a “reconceptualization” of reality itself is necessary to help us understand the ways in which social worlds involving highly sophisticated technologies are created and endowed with meaning by actors, as well as the subtle, long-term effects of such technologies.     

Effects of 360° video on attitudes toward disaster communication: Mediating and moderating roles of spatial presence and prior disaster media involvement

Visual media technologies such as 360° video, augmented reality, and virtual reality are on the rise for immersive storytelling in a variety of public relations contexts. Yet there is a profound lack of scholarly research in public relations, crisis communication, and disaster communication to explore the effects of content displayed using these delivery formats on publics’ responses. To begin addressing the knowledge gap, this work reports results from a laboratory experiment investigating effects of media modality (traditional unidirectional video content vs. 360° omnidirectional video content) on attitudes toward the disaster communication content. Results demonstrate that 360° video featuring the aftermath of a natural disaster yields enhanced attitudes toward the helpful impact of the content. Importantly, mediation analyses show that (1) a sense of spatial presence underlies these effects, and (2) the mediating effects of spatial presence are attenuated by involvement with similar disaster media coverage (indirect experience).     

Skill training in multimodal virtual environments

Multimodal, immersive, virtual reality (VR) techniques open new perspectives for perceptual-motor skill trainers. They also introduce new risks and dangers. This paper describes the benefits and pitfalls of multimodal training and the cognitive building blocks of a multimodal, VR training simulators.     

Copresence in Virtual Environments

Copresence, the sense of “being together” with others, is at the center of theories about social interaction. It is an intra‐individual sense that stems from and shapes the social context. Recent research on copresence in virtual environments (VEs), synthetic simulations of existing experiences (e.g., desktop computer environments, “virtual reality”), demonstrates the variability in which people experience copresence with others who are not sharing in the same time or space. At the same time, experimental researchers in sociology are using VEs as a methodological tool, yet remain unaware about the ramifications of varying levels of copresence for the social processes under investigation. The goal of this review is to introduce sociologists to the research on copresence, specifically highlighting findings and gaps important for those who use VEs in their research practice. An understanding of how copresence occurs in VEs can improve how well sociologists design experiments to advance theories about interpersonal behavior.     

The added value of virtual reality technology and force feedback for surgical training simulators

Laparoscopic surgery requires more specialized training of the surgeons than traditional open surgery. The Virtual Basic Laparoscopic Surgical Trainer (VBLaST) is being developed as a virtual version of the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Skills (FLS) trainer. This study assessed the current haptic and virtual reality (VR) technology of a virtual peg transfer task of the VBLaST, based on the subjective preference of surgeons and their objective task performance measures. Twenty-one surgical residents, fellows and attendings performed a peg-transfer task in the FLS and the VBLaST. Each subject performed 10 trials on each simulator. Results showed that subjects performed significantly better on the FLS than on the VBLaST. Subjects showed a significant learning effect on both simulators, but with an accelerated improvement on the VBLaST. Even so, 81% of the subjects preferred the FLS over the VBLaST for surgical training which could be attributed to the novelty of the VR technology and existing deficiencies of the haptic interface. Despite the subjective preference for the physical simulator, the performance results indicate an added value of VR and haptics in surgical training, which is expected to be demonstrated in more surgically relevant tasks such as suturing and knot-tying.     

网络时代上海社会管理创新研究

社会管理创新是一个时代课题。随着以信息技术为支撑的网络社会的逐步形成和深入发展,虚拟网络已经渗透到现实社会生活的各个方面,成为人们社会交往的重要渠道和实现人际关系的重要载体。网络社会对上海社会运行的影响力逐渐强化,现实社会对网络社会的依赖性与日俱增。网络时代的到来,对上海的社会管理工作带来了全新的命题。一方面网络为城市社会管理提供了新的手段和方式;另一方面网络也对上海现有的社会管理体制形成较大的挑战。深入揭示网络社会与现实社会的互动关系及内在机理,阐明网络传播对现实社会管理产生的种种影响,把握利用网络加强社会管理的有效方式,构建涵盖网络社会与现实社会的社会管理的新体制与新机制,是上海社会管理创新的一项重要任务。