Researching virtual environments and characters

In a broad sense a virtual environment is when something – a book, a film, or a computer game – makes a human being experience another environment than the one she is physically situated in. In a narrower use of the term, some form of digital technology lies behind the experience in question. There is a variety of technologies that can be used to create or manipulate perceptual information to make people associate it with another environment than the physical environment they are situated in. For the most powerful virtual environments, people can hardly differentiate which environment is “real” – the virtual or the physical. But in the more common case people very well know, on a reflective level, that the virtual environment they act in or respond towards is not “the real one”. Nevertheless they act and react as if it was. They are engaged in the virtual environment and experience a kind of being there. In this respect there is no absolute difference between, for example, a virtual environment generated from an ordinary desktop-computer game and one generated from more powerful Virtual Reality technology (such as in Fig. 1a).