The next speakers in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen are Udo Göttlich and Felix Krell, whose focus is on interaction and representation in digital media use. Interaction theory has traditionally focussed on social interactions in offline worlds between co-present social actors, coordinating and negotiating their shared social situation, but this does not apply directly to online social interactions where there is no physical co-presence; such theory has been translated to such environments by emphasising shared the affect and intensity of online interactions, and considerations of temporality and immediacy.
Differences between synchronous and asynchronous interactions, and the absence of corporeal communicative cues are especially critical here. Virtual reality environments seek to return to such co-present, synchronous settings; users are corporeality relocated into the VR environment, and their movements and actions may be represented somewhat realistically in these spaces. These spaces can then also be studied via embodied VR fieldwork.
Interactions in social VR transform face-to-face situations from a body-to-body starting point, and still do not model direct corporeal interactions accurately; this creates odd situations where in principle users could walk straight through a crowd of other avatars but where such actions would be seen as offensive, and destroy the shared embodied illusion. VR environments often model conventional physical environments to assist that illusion of physical co-presence; the delocalised social virtual reality media environment nonetheless models a glocal embodied physical space, and real-world interaction orders are maintained here.
