Welcome to the presentation of "There is no first or third person view in virtual reality:
understanding the perspective continuum".
I'm Matthias Hoppe and I'm happy to present this on behalf of my co-authors.
Video games offer wide variety of game design. For example the task, characters, story,
the artistic look, the control schemes. But one of the important design elements is perspective.
First person perspective for example, places the camera inside the character and therefore
the character serves as a vessel for the player. The player can then explore dungeons and swing
their weapons and BE the character. Third person perspective on the other hand places the camera
outside of and often behind the character to give a better overview of the world, give the character
more of an identity as the player can see the character model and it is often used in cinematic
cut-scenes. VR on the other hand often replicates first-person view from traditional video games.
That's because the technology lends itself to it. Players are placed inside a virtual world,
they can look around and they can interact with the world via motion tracking.
Some VR experiences however explore the use of traditional third person view, "Lucky's Tale" for
example. However, this is different from traditional games in third person view as
the player is still placed inside a world and can look around. Therefore, the player controls the
character via a controller and button presses but also is inside the world as an observer itself.
Another example for third person view is "Astro Bot". The player controls the character
via a gamepad, like in the example before. However, the player is also a deity itself
in the world, which can directly interact with the world and help the small character via the
controller gadgets. Here, therefore the player plays two separate characters at the same time.
Once the small character via the gamepad and the button presses and once the deity
with their own body via the motion control of the controller.
Therefore, how is this perceived by different players? Some might say they see it from a third
person perspective and they are the character. Others might perceive it from a first person
perspective and they have the feeling that they are standing in front of a diorama or dollhouse.
However, this does not necessarily need to exclude each other. Sometimes it's something
in between. "A fisherman's Tale" here places you in a first person perspective as you know,
but also there's a miniature of yourself on the table that mirrors your movement.
And also there's a giant outside of the hut and apparently it mirrors the movement as well.
So you're kind of three persons in different dimensions with different sizes and perspective
at the same time. So we ask ourselves how do different perspectives affect our experiences of
VR. Are we the puppeteer? Are we the character? Or are we something in between?
For this we created a sword fighting game with motion controls in VR. The player can move,
the character mirrors the movement, and we included a sword to make it easier to see the
movement of the character from a third person perspective as the camera is placed behind it.
For the study we compared first and third person perspective. We also looked at different camera
setups and different heights, however, please refer to the paper for additional details. Here
you can see the first person perspective, like in normal VR experiences, and here you can see the
third person perspective, but with motion control of the character. So if you move the character
moves, if you move your head the character's head moves and your a view moves as well.
The evaluation here is a little harder. Traditional embodiment questionnaires and other
means of evaluation usually aim at a traditional understanding of embodiment. Therefore, we let the
users rate on a continuous line, as you can see in the top left here. but we wanted to avoid asking
for terms like "first" or "third", "embodiment", "character" or "observer", to not prime them in
their decision. We also looked at presence, agency and other things, but please refer to the paper
for additional information on this. We found that there are more than two points on this continuum.
So neither it's only first person view, as you might have suspected because VR lends itself to
first person view. But also it's not a traditional understanding of first versus third person.
Therefore, we suggest a perspective continuum rather than two discrete points. Perspective
as an active and deliberate design element could be interesting for future developers.
Exposure therapy for example could give the client an easy start into the exposure. They could be
disconnected from the character and then gradually increase the intensity and difficulty for the
exposure itself. This concludes the presentation, we found that there is no first and third person
view in VR. Instead we propose a perspective continuum rather than two discrete points.
This could serve as a design element for future VR developers
and could also serve as a nice "easy mode" for exposure therapy.