Make-Believing Virtual Realities

Abstract

A current concern in human-computer interaction lies in understanding how we experience virtual reality (VR). This chapter proposes that the VR experience relies on make-believe. The necessary decoupling from the real world to the make-believe world is costly in terms of the cognitive resources required but VR offloads some of the computation cost into the virtual environment (VE) itself. This is particularly true of high fidelity, immersive virtual environments. However, our ability to make-believe allows us to ‘fill-in’ the gaps in quite simple VR environments, with surprisingly effective results: we argue that this is because we have a propensity to see the world, including fictional and artificial worlds, as schematic.