Into the metaverse

Presentation Through Misrepresentation in Virtual Reality

problems of a digital age

As of writing, 32% of Americans have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. While we anxiously await returning to “normal,” whenever that may be, let’s take a look back on the past year and how we’ve still managed to maintain our lives despite a global pandemic. In a frankly amazing technological feat, we’ve managed to stay connected through the internet and other virtual spaces. Business can still conduct sales, schools can still hold classes, and we can still see the faces of our far-away families. But there’s something different about these interactions. They feel off, like they’re cheap imitations of what could have been rather than their own platform with plenty of possibilities.

A communicative loss, and a typical sight for students nowadays.

With our former face-to-face interactions now occurring from behind screens, we’re forced to awkwardly transition into virtual environments missing many key features of communication. Zoom meetings can’t capture subtle body movements or the intangible feeling of being close. There’s so much depth and nuance to interpersonal connection that we never realized until we tried to cram it into woefully limited digital spaces. In fact, I think the isolated loneliness creeping up on many of us might help us get closer to answering an age-old question: understanding ourselves, and figuring who the heck we are anyway.

Spider-man certainly doesn't know himself! Virtual reality could help both him and us out!

Understanding ourselves, or well, trying

Before we begin, we need to realize that it’s impossible to actually understand ourself. At least not in the fullest, deepest possible sense. The self, like a 4D object to our eyes, is inherently incomprehensible. We cannot understand them from approaching them head on and trying to absorb their entirety. Like how we can create a mental image of a 4D object through piecing together its different 3D surfaces, we can gain a more accurate, but still fundamentally incomplete perception of a self through presentations. Analogous to 3D surfaces of a 4D object, presentations are manifestations of different traits of the self, which arise when viewed from different “angles” or social situations.

Presentations are different views of a self, similar to snapshots in time.

The concept of presentations allow us to abstract the self, much like 4D objects, into pieces that are easier to understand. Importantly, multiple presentations of the same self can have contradictory traits. Which presentation we use depends on the context of our environment. How we present ourselves during an in-person interaction with another human being probably differs from how we present ourselves on a social media platform such as Facebook, or even other online settings like Zoom or forums.

Superman and Clark Kent are excellent examples of the same self presenting itself in different ways depending on the context.

Futher Abstracting the Self

We can further break down the abstracted self, or presentations, into two components: the body and mind. In real life, the body is exactly what it sounds like. A physical body that represents us relative to other physical objects we share reality with. Our body can be sensed and interpreted by others. Its physical appearance inevitably communicates information. In online environments, a body usually takes the form of an avatar, a character, image, or other object that represents us. Examples might be profile pictures or virtual characters in video games. The mind aspect of a presentation refers to the behaviors we engage in and how we interact with our environment. In real life, we might confide secrets or insecurities in close friends, but probably not in strangers we passed on the street. The psychologist Carl Jung described this concept as “persona,” which refers to the masks Roman actors wore in order to assume different roles on stage. We can also don different personas in virtual environments, ranging from role-playing as different characters in video games to deliberately selecting what to post online.

A presentation is further divided into both body and mind components.

Currently, the malleable factors of presentations in online spaces are fewer than in physical spaces. We have less control over how parts of our avatars and personas. Since the pandemic started, I’m sure we’ve spent countless hours in Zoom or some other virtual meeting space. There, we’re stuck with an avatar equivalent to our physical body. If we’d want to change our avatar representation on Zoom, we’d first need to modify our body, which is often completely infeasible. Similarly, virtual spaces limit how we can interact with others to the confines of the system. I can’t reach out and touch someone I’m speaking with virtually like I can in real life. Behavioral elements of presentations can become completely lost if a virtual space doesn’t allow for them.

Virtual environments like social media implicitly restrict the ways we can communicate with others, far more than real life's laws of physics.

Why malleability Matters

We’ve identified why communicating virtually can feel so lonely and restrictive. Communication, in abstract, is merely sharing our presentations and other information with others. When pieces of presentations can’t be conveyed, such as by technological limitations, we can’t help but feel that interaction is missing a vital “something”. Zoom meetings or other virtual calls fail to offer meaningful connections when they forego the tiny details present in real life. Problematically, online spaces were designed to supplement, not supplant, face-to-face interactions. But what if virtual reality technologies advanced to the point where they were fully immersive? If virtual realities let us control all aspects of our presentations, even ones we can’t control in real, physical reality, would we still feel the loneliness and isolation we do now?

Good communication is like the Powerpuff Girls. They're both incomplete without that "Mysterious Chemical X".

When presentations in virtual environments are fully under our control, they can become completely distanced from any physical presentations. Virtual avatars are not shackled by the difficulties of altering physical appearances. A handful of clicks and a few seconds might be all it takes to change your hair color, height, or race. Through personas, we can partake in actions that might not be socially acceptable. Murdering a bandit by shouting them to death is just a daily occurance in the world of the video game Skyrim, but that probably wouldn’t fly in real life. Just like avatars, these too are easily malleable. A few chat messages or dialogue choices might completely alter online demeanors or personalities. Virtual reality gives us a wealth of new options to present ourselves, but with this freedom also comes several questions.

Even when physical reality limits our presentational abilities.

A Fundamental Misrepresentation

Presentations constructed in virtual reality offer new points of view to examine the self. Since these presentations aren’t possibile in physical reality, we can explore socially repressed aspects of ourselves or experiment with physically impossible avatars. Perhaps we may find ourselves identifying deeply with a presentation completely different from our body and behavior in real life. In fact, the potential for such a departure reveals that the freedom for virtual presentations relies on misrepresentation. That is, we can only present ourselves freely because virtual environments allow for presentations incongruous with those in real life. If we could not misrepresent ourselves in virtual environments, then our presentations would need to be exactly the same as in physical reality.

I couldn't become an amazing fantasy hero in real life, but I easily could in a virtual environment!

Problematically, the word “misrepresentation” seems to imply a departure from truth. If we can present ourselves however we please, is there a “true self” anymore? Remember that presentations are merely different manifestations of the same self. Thus, contradictory presentations does not imply one right and one wrong. In fact, contradictory presentations might allow us to discover under what contexts our morals or other attributes change. Moreover, does the knowledge that we might be interacting with a presentation prime us to act differently and perhaps adopt a different presentation of our own? I argue that interactions in physical reality incorrectly assume we are interacting with pure, “true” selves rather than the presentations we truly engage with. Virtual environments merely bring this observation to light.

The popular internet streamer Pokimane and her virtual avatar. Would usage of an avatar cause us to treat these presentations differently?

Self-perception is another area for investigation. The presentation derived from virtualizing ourselves might not match our physical representation. Within physical reality, we cannot experience life as who we imagine ourselves to be. However, virtual reality gives us the opportunity to interact as if we were fully who we believed we are, not who we actually are. The same opportunity applies to presentations incongruous with our physical presentations. Even then, self-perception is just one of the many presentations we can experiment with.

Is my presentation in real life more true than a virtual one? Is the virtual one more true? Does it not matter? Are they both truthful?

As virtual environments have taken center stage for communicative interactions, we should reassess the platform. There’s far more to virtual communication than merely trying (and failing) to emulate real life. Only by embracing the freedom and misrepresentation of virtual spaces can we unlock new ways of understanding ourselves and each other.