Sociology of VR: how we turn ourselves into an attraction

Matrix is ​​a series of podcasts from Cryplogger in which we understand how the digital environment is being transformed with the advent of VR and augmented reality technologies, and we talk about metaverses with pioneers: businessmen, researchers and philosophers. In this issue, sociologists Maria Erofeeva and Niels Klowait tell how virtual reality came into their research interests and why we have not even come close to adequately understanding the role of this technology in society.

Cryplogger: How would you briefly define what you do?

Niels: We are multimodal microsociologists. This means that we are interested in how people in the everyday world achieve practical goals. How they order coffee in a cafe, how they get off the subway, how they cross the road and what resources they use – gestures, looks, voice, intonation. And separately, we explore how the social world is transformed when we add new technologies to it, as well as how virtual reality is contextualized within this framework. Now the main one of my projects is the study of the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence at the University of Paderborn.

Maria: The word “microsociology” has a key part – “micro”. We look at human interactions on a small scale, while classical sociology looks at the macro level – classes, society. Qualitative methods, that is, those that seek to answer the question “how?”, are optimally suited to solving our problems. For example, what practices do people generally use to interact.

Now I am starting a postdoc at the Free University of Brussels, which will be entirely devoted to the socio-anthropological study of virtual reality. In particular, I will study what people do in VR, what meanings they give to their actions, how their identities are formed, how they gather in communities.

Cryplogger: What problems does VR pose for a sociologist?

Niels: I’ll give you an example. When we have technological mediation of interaction, as in VR, then some ideas that seemed self-evident change. For example, microsociology was once defined as a discipline that deals with the space of mutual visibility and audibility. And now this question becomes very problematic. What I am now saying in a certain room reaches you in a certain amount of time. Accordingly, it is likely that the sequence of events that are 1-2-3 for me, for you, due to communication failures, can turn into 1-3-2. Moreover, physical co-presence is excluded from sociological research. It doesn’t have to be in VR.

Maria: Technology poses a serious challenge to sociological theory. This in itself is very inspiring: an empirical object has arisen that makes you think, explore and formulate new conceptualizations.

Cryplogger: When did microsociologists get interested in VR?

Maria: A historian of virtual reality would answer this question something like this: VR is a long-standing phenomenon that arose back in the 1970s and 80s. But in those years, it was about extremely expensive and cumbersome technologies that were primarily used in military and medical laboratories. We are interested in the moment when virtual reality begins to go to the masses, becomes easier to use and accessible to the consumer.

The first watershed runs through 2010-2014, when commercial versions of virtual reality helmets appear. The second stage is 2019, when the Oculus Quest was released, which does not require connection to a gaming computer with a powerful graphics card. This gadget started a new page in the history of VR. It allows the person on the street who doesn’t know anything about it to try virtual reality and maybe get interested in the technology.

Cryplogger: How do you learn VR?

Niels: First of all, we are videographers — we shoot everything and then we analyze it. In addition, we use multimodal conversion analysis. For example, recently my article about how people in virtual reality put on and take off masks in one zombie shooter. In this case, I am interested in how, with new resources and old bodies, people organize activities in strange spaces where certain things are visible to others, but some elements of bodily action, for example, are not. We also use ethnographic methods to help understand how specific communities develop in virtual reality.

Maria: In any case, one of the researchers must be in VR to record. Accordingly, the question arises as to whether we remain neutral observers or not. Yes and no. We often remain anonymous. But when it comes to studying specific communities, we reveal our identities. For example, we started studying the community that teaches sign languages ​​in VR. We told the participants that we were researchers and asked to be allowed to record. Haven’t had any issues getting consent yet.

Cryplogger: Give an example of some extreme wildness that you have encountered in your research.

Niels: Masha and I discovered the VRChat space for ourselves early. There are always wild things going on. For example, we have video data where one person holds out an object to another, and the giver sees this object as a bottle of vodka, and the receiver sees it as a pack of chips. Another example: there are five users in the same room. Three of them see only three, the fourth sees only one, because in virtual reality you can selectively remove people from the room, but this happens only for you. Or, for example, we are used to the fact that when a person looks at you, he pays attention to you. But in VR, avatars can be set to look at everyone in the room. If you see that someone turns his head towards you, this does not mean that he really turns his head towards you.

Finally, in VRChat, avatars, which we usually think of as bipedal hominids, are not required at all. I have seen virtual bodies in the form of kilometer by kilometer rollercoasters that others can ride, in the form of everyday objects, in the form of avatars assembled from several avatars. All of these skins affect interaction options. In general, this is a colossal field of oddities and curiosities, which, nevertheless, are ordered and organized – and pose a lot of questions for the sociologist.

Cryplogger: Who might be interested in such research?

Niels: On the one hand, our research is avant-garde. We simply climb into the strangest spaces and try to set certain tasks from them, which we can then present to potential customers in the light of corporate pragmatics. On the other hand, we have quite “classic cases”. Then there is the customer who raises specific questions: how does everything happen in VR, what affects the success of completing a certain interaction, what tools do people turn to to achieve practical goals, how can we improve, transform, adapt them?

But VR at the moment is still a solution looking for a problem. We understand that it’s cool to be together in a virtual space, but this is a very strange co-presence. So far, this is an avant-garde space, where we are slowly groping for what good can be done with it.

Maria: It is important to clarify that we are now talking about interaction within virtual reality. But there is still use of VR in classic physical environments. For example, we had a study on how virtual reality helmets are used in school classrooms. Education is a fairly large segment of VR, including for various complex professions where you need to gain skills in working with extremely expensive machines. In such cases, it is cheaper to emulate them.

Cryplogger: Do you explore metaverses?

Maria: There is a lot of hype associated with the word “metaverses”. But the content of this concept is too vague. If by metauniverses we mean relatively autonomous worlds that require some kind of technology to be found and within which activities are not predetermined, that is, these are not games, but just free space where users themselves can decide what to do, then yes, we are exploring this.

Niels: It seems to me that the hype around this topic is created by corporations such as Meta, where they think that if we now capture most of the future digital infrastructure, then de facto we will control a significant element of people’s everyday life and do whatever they want with it. This is a dubious approach.

There is no radical difference between the virtual and physical worlds. Our everyday reality has already been transformed in many ways, connected with very distant actors who are not physically present. Accordingly, the distinction between mediated and non-mediated interaction, “pure meat space”, as some of our informants put it, and virtual space is destroyed.

Maria: On the one hand, I agree with Niels, but on the other, I don’t quite agree. Yes, our everyday life is mediated and permeated with technology, but VR has not yet reached this level: it is quite cumbersome and still inconvenient. It may intertwine with everyday life as it becomes miniaturized and simplified, but it is not clear when this will happen. I don’t see a clear horizon yet.

There is another point: people can use VR to escape from ordinary reality in order to literally live in an alternative world. That is, the users themselves may not connect the two realities, but, on the contrary, distance them.

Cryplogger: Nils, what do you think about ChatGPT in relation to your current university research?

Niels: We do not have a public understanding of what the capabilities of this technology and its iterations are. But there is a very large amount of magical thinking: “I will sell you such a prompt now, because I am a prompt engineer!” The very emergence of industrial engineering indicates a gap in knowledge about this space, which is opposed by the notion that some have understanding. Whether it is real or not is a deeply secondary question.

Added to this is the fact that access to Chat GPT technology is highly fragmented. Not everyone can use it, not in all countries. There are, of course, people who program with it and produce highly creative things. There is also a certain layer of people – it seems to me, not very large – who are now silent, amazed by the new opportunities, and just use this thing. For example me.

As for further development, this is a political issue. It’s not about whether Microsoft will be able to implement ChatGPT in all their products, so that he sits in our video conferences, reads our correspondence, creates entries in the Outlook calendar. It is a question of whether we want such systems, without our understanding of how they make decisions, to increasingly interact with our world. I have no illusions that a deepening of their presence will take place, but what matters is how it will be configured in a social sense, how we can defend our borders and our voice.

Cryplogger: Maria, doesn’t the development of artificial intelligence scare you too much?

Maria: I’m not afraid at all. I, on the contrary, look at it all with enthusiasm, because it is a very interesting process that needs to be explored. It’s something that gives me work and food for thought.

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Matrix is ​​a series of podcasts from Cryplogger in which we understand how the digital environment is being transformed with the advent of VR and augmented reality technologies, and we talk about metaverses with pioneers: businessmen, researchers and philosophers. In this issue, sociologists Maria Erofeeva and Niels Klowait tell how virtual reality came into their research interests and why we have not even come close to adequately understanding the role of this technology in society.

Cryplogger: How would you briefly define what you do?

Niels: We are multimodal microsociologists. This means that we are interested in how people in the everyday world achieve practical goals. How they order coffee in a cafe, how they get off the subway, how they cross the road and what resources they use – gestures, looks, voice, intonation. And separately, we explore how the social world is transformed when we add new technologies to it, as well as how virtual reality is contextualized within this framework. Now the main one of my projects is the study of the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence at the University of Paderborn.

Maria: The word “microsociology” has a key part – “micro”. We look at human interactions on a small scale, while classical sociology looks at the macro level – classes, society. Qualitative methods, that is, those that seek to answer the question “how?”, are optimally suited to solving our problems. For example, what practices do people generally use to interact.

Now I am starting a postdoc at the Free University of Brussels, which will be entirely devoted to the socio-anthropological study of virtual reality. In particular, I will study what people do in VR, what meanings they give to their actions, how their identities are formed, how they gather in communities.

Cryplogger: What problems does VR pose for a sociologist?

Niels: I’ll give you an example. When we have technological mediation of interaction, as in VR, then some ideas that seemed self-evident change. For example, microsociology was once defined as a discipline that deals with the space of mutual visibility and audibility. And now this question becomes very problematic. What I am now saying in a certain room reaches you in a certain amount of time. Accordingly, it is likely that the sequence of events that are 1-2-3 for me, for you, due to communication failures, can turn into 1-3-2. Moreover, physical co-presence is excluded from sociological research. It doesn’t have to be in VR.

Maria: Technology poses a serious challenge to sociological theory. This in itself is very inspiring: an empirical object has arisen that makes you think, explore and formulate new conceptualizations.

Cryplogger: When did microsociologists get interested in VR?

Maria: A historian of virtual reality would answer this question something like this: VR is a long-standing phenomenon that arose back in the 1970s and 80s. But in those years, it was about extremely expensive and cumbersome technologies that were primarily used in military and medical laboratories. We are interested in the moment when virtual reality begins to go to the masses, becomes easier to use and accessible to the consumer.

The first watershed runs through 2010-2014, when commercial versions of virtual reality helmets appear. The second stage is 2019, when the Oculus Quest was released, which does not require connection to a gaming computer with a powerful graphics card. This gadget started a new page in the history of VR. It allows the person on the street who doesn’t know anything about it to try virtual reality and maybe get interested in the technology.

Cryplogger: How do you learn VR?

Niels: First of all, we are videographers — we shoot everything and then we analyze it. In addition, we use multimodal conversion analysis. For example, recently my article about how people in virtual reality put on and take off masks in one zombie shooter. In this case, I am interested in how, with new resources and old bodies, people organize activities in strange spaces where certain things are visible to others, but some elements of bodily action, for example, are not. We also use ethnographic methods to help understand how specific communities develop in virtual reality.

Maria: In any case, one of the researchers must be in VR to record. Accordingly, the question arises as to whether we remain neutral observers or not. Yes and no. We often remain anonymous. But when it comes to studying specific communities, we reveal our identities. For example, we started studying the community that teaches sign languages ​​in VR. We told the participants that we were researchers and asked to be allowed to record. Haven’t had any issues getting consent yet.

Cryplogger: Give an example of some extreme wildness that you have encountered in your research.

Niels: Masha and I discovered the VRChat space for ourselves early. There are always wild things going on. For example, we have video data where one person holds out an object to another, and the giver sees this object as a bottle of vodka, and the receiver sees it as a pack of chips. Another example: there are five users in the same room. Three of them see only three, the fourth sees only one, because in virtual reality you can selectively remove people from the room, but this happens only for you. Or, for example, we are used to the fact that when a person looks at you, he pays attention to you. But in VR, avatars can be set to look at everyone in the room. If you see that someone turns his head towards you, this does not mean that he really turns his head towards you.

Finally, in VRChat, avatars, which we usually think of as bipedal hominids, are not required at all. I have seen virtual bodies in the form of kilometer by kilometer rollercoasters that others can ride, in the form of everyday objects, in the form of avatars assembled from several avatars. All of these skins affect interaction options. In general, this is a colossal field of oddities and curiosities, which, nevertheless, are ordered and organized – and pose a lot of questions for the sociologist.

Cryplogger: Who might be interested in such research?

Niels: On the one hand, our research is avant-garde. We simply climb into the strangest spaces and try to set certain tasks from them, which we can then present to potential customers in the light of corporate pragmatics. On the other hand, we have quite “classic cases”. Then there is the customer who raises specific questions: how does everything happen in VR, what affects the success of completing a certain interaction, what tools do people turn to to achieve practical goals, how can we improve, transform, adapt them?

But VR at the moment is still a solution looking for a problem. We understand that it’s cool to be together in a virtual space, but this is a very strange co-presence. So far, this is an avant-garde space, where we are slowly groping for what good can be done with it.

Maria: It is important to clarify that we are now talking about interaction within virtual reality. But there is still use of VR in classic physical environments. For example, we had a study on how virtual reality helmets are used in school classrooms. Education is a fairly large segment of VR, including for various complex professions where you need to gain skills in working with extremely expensive machines. In such cases, it is cheaper to emulate them.

Cryplogger: Do you explore metaverses?

Maria: There is a lot of hype associated with the word “metaverses”. But the content of this concept is too vague. If by metauniverses we mean relatively autonomous worlds that require some kind of technology to be found and within which activities are not predetermined, that is, these are not games, but just free space where users themselves can decide what to do, then yes, we are exploring this.

Niels: It seems to me that the hype around this topic is created by corporations such as Meta, where they think that if we now capture most of the future digital infrastructure, then de facto we will control a significant element of people’s everyday life and do whatever they want with it. This is a dubious approach.

There is no radical difference between the virtual and physical worlds. Our everyday reality has already been transformed in many ways, connected with very distant actors who are not physically present. Accordingly, the distinction between mediated and non-mediated interaction, “pure meat space”, as some of our informants put it, and virtual space is destroyed.

Maria: On the one hand, I agree with Niels, but on the other, I don’t quite agree. Yes, our everyday life is mediated and permeated with technology, but VR has not yet reached this level: it is quite cumbersome and still inconvenient. It may intertwine with everyday life as it becomes miniaturized and simplified, but it is not clear when this will happen. I don’t see a clear horizon yet.

There is another point: people can use VR to escape from ordinary reality in order to literally live in an alternative world. That is, the users themselves may not connect the two realities, but, on the contrary, distance them.

Cryplogger: Nils, what do you think about ChatGPT in relation to your current university research?

Niels: We do not have a public understanding of what the capabilities of this technology and its iterations are. But there is a very large amount of magical thinking: “I will sell you such a prompt now, because I am a prompt engineer!” The very emergence of industrial engineering indicates a gap in knowledge about this space, which is opposed by the notion that some have understanding. Whether it is real or not is a deeply secondary question.

Added to this is the fact that access to Chat GPT technology is highly fragmented. Not everyone can use it, not in all countries. There are, of course, people who program with it and produce highly creative things. There is also a certain layer of people – it seems to me, not very large – who are now silent, amazed by the new opportunities, and just use this thing. For example me.

As for further development, this is a political issue. It’s not about whether Microsoft will be able to implement ChatGPT in all their products, so that he sits in our video conferences, reads our correspondence, creates entries in the Outlook calendar. It is a question of whether we want such systems, without our understanding of how they make decisions, to increasingly interact with our world. I have no illusions that a deepening of their presence will take place, but what matters is how it will be configured in a social sense, how we can defend our borders and our voice.

Cryplogger: Maria, doesn’t the development of artificial intelligence scare you too much?

Maria: I’m not afraid at all. I, on the contrary, look at it all with enthusiasm, because it is a very interesting process that needs to be explored. It’s something that gives me work and food for thought.

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