Tangibility, immersivity, realness: the psychology of spatial phenomenology

When we open our eyes and look out into the world, we experience an immersive 3-dimensional space occupied by objects that appear tangible and real. The fact that this phenomenological impression is not simply a property of the real world, but a construct of our psychology, is evidenced by the fact that we can also have impressions of 3D visual space where these phenomenological characteristics are lacking.

For example, when viewing a conventional movie in a theatre, we perceive moving images where we perceive 3D space and objects but not with the same sense of spatial immersion and object tangibility as “real” space. 3D movies, however, can magically reinstate the phenomenology. Furthermore, even when viewing the real world, the impression of immersion and tangibility is not uniform throughout visual space—it diminishes with distance from the observer. Historically, these observations have been explained solely on the basis of the psychology of binocular vision.

Dr. Vishwanath will present an alternative view that argues that the phenomenological characteristics of visual space, and their variation across conditions, arise from multiple distinct neural encodings of visual space that have evolved in animal visual systems as adaptations to specific motor and cognitive behaviour. This alternative view has implications for immersive technology that seeks to synthetically mimic the phenomenology of real space in interactive displays.

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Host or Publisher Leeds Institute for Data Analytics