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Oculus Rift Effects on Presence and Dreams: Replication and Extension
- 1. OCULUS RIFT EFFECTS ON PRESENCE AND DREAMS: REPLICATION AND EXTENSION AKSHYA BOOPALAN, ELISA WHITE, AND JAYNE GACKENBACH Boopalan, A., White, E. & Gackenbach, J.I. (2016, June). Oculus Rift Effects on Presence and Dreams: Replication and Extension. Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Rolduc, Netherlands. Abstract published in the International Journal of Dream Research, 9(supplement 1), July 2016, Retrieved https://journals.ub.uni- heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/article/view/32382/pdf
- 2. • Virtual Reality (VR) technology - A new reality and a sense of presence • Video gamers - Higher lucidity, control and presence in dreams
- 3. PRESENCE: IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN WHERE YOU REALLY ARE.
- 5. TELEVISION AND FILM TAKE YOU AWAY
- 6. VIRTUAL WORLDS ARE OUT OF THIS WORLD.
- 7. DREAMS: THE ULTIMATE SENSE OF PRESENCE
- 8. METHODS • Two parts – In-lab session and at-home response
- 9. Condition Order Rift Control Total Dream Reported Pre-Game play Pre-rift 23 Pre-control 21 44 Dream Reported Post-Game play Post-rift 25 Post-control 22 47 Total 48 43 91 THE FOUR EXPERIMENTAL GROUPS
- 10. Pre Game Play Dream Collection • IN LAB • Report a recent dream • Rate presence of that dream • Play games (Rift or Control) • Rate presence in the game • AT-HOME • Go home and dream • Report next dream and rate presence of that dream Post Game Play Dream Collection • IN LAB • Play games (Rift or Control) • Rate presence in the game • Report a recent dream • Rate the presence of that dream • AT-HOME • Go home and dream • Report next dream and rate the presence of that dream ORDER OF DREAM COLLECTION
- 13. PRESENCE DURING GAME PLAY. 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 Rift Control Presence During Game Play Does the virtual world create a stronger sense of presence? • There was a marginal difference in presence which approached statistical significance.
- 14. WHY?????
- 15. PRESENCE DURING GAME PLAY. • However we did find a main effect for presence in gameplay, by when dreams were reported. • Those who reported a dream before gameplay reported feeling more present in the game, consistent across both conditions. 4.4 4.6 4.8 5 5.2 5.4 5.6 5.8 Dreams Reported Before Game Play Dreams Reported After Game Play Presence During Game Play
- 16. PRESENCE IN DREAMS Does the virtual world have an effect on subsequent dreams? • Comparing dreams reported in the lab to dreams reported after the lab session. • Main effect for presence as a function of where the dream was reported • Interaction between condition and where dream was reported. 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 In Lab Post Lab In Lab vs Post Lab Dream Presence Rift Control
- 17. PRESENCE IN DREAMS • Comparing dreams reported before or after gameplay. • interaction approaches significance 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 6 Pre Dream Collection Post Dream Collection Pre vs Post Game play Rift Control
- 18. DREAM CONTENT AND TYPE RESULTS
- 19. RESULTS – LUCID DREAMING • Does the Rift elicit more lucid dreaming? • For judge - ratings of dreams • More reported in-lab • Across lab and post-lab dreams – Rift condition higher in lucidity
- 20. 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 Pre-Rift Post-rift Pre-Control Post-Control Rift Control Observer Dreams - Self-report OBSERVER DREAMS – SELF REPORT In-Lab At-home
- 21. RESULTS – NIGHTMARES • Rift condition - Slight increase at-home compared to in-lab • Control condition - Dramatic decrease from in-lab to at-home 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 Rift Control Nightmare Frequency In-lab In-labAt-home At-home
- 22. DISCUSSION • Presence - a more complex concept than VR literature would suggest. • Sensitized to report more lucid type dreams. • Questioning reality may generalize to other, related experiences
- 23. CONCLUSIONS • The current results show that the technology (Rift or PC) has some degree of effect on elements of presence and dreams • Our major explanation – priming the participant with game play– effect on memory of dream as well as subsequent dreams • It is possible that if VR can have some effect on first time participants, those who spend much more time in virtual worlds may see a greater effect of lucidity in their dreams
- 24. LIMITATIONS • All female participants • Experimenter effect and demand characteristic • Participants perhaps not understanding the presence questions causing them to rate higher or lower
Editor's Notes
- My name is Akshya Boopalan and I have been working as a research assistant to Dr. Gackenbach in the video game and dreams laboratory at MacEwan University. We worked on a replication and extension of the study just presented by Ann Sinyard. Virtual reality is becoming an increasingly popular mode of interacting with the world, especially for video games. The headgear projects a 3D virtual world that invokes a sense of presence, very much like that experienced in dreams. We know that video gamers tend to have higher lucidity, control and presence in their dreams than those who don’t play as frequently. So for those who spend more time in VR, the mind may be affected by the presence and control exhibited in this reality which in turn can be felt in dreams. So, in our research we looked at such possible effects. Here now is Elisa White, my partner in this project, and she will be talking to you about the presence portion of our study. .. Elisa…..
- I’m Elisa White and over the last year I too have been working as a research assistant to Dr. Gackenbach in the video game and dreams laboratory at MacEwan University. First I’d like to define presence for you. Presence is what it feels like to be somewhere that you are not. The more immersive the stimulus the more present you will feel. I’ll give you a few examples.
- In literature presence is called transportation – a good book can transport you to another time and place and take you on a grand adventure, all without leaving the comfort of your favorite chair.
- This also happens in television and film – for me I always think of the movie Avatar. That film does an incredible job of taking the audience to an alien world to experience the aww and wonder of such a beautiful alien planet.
- Just like with books and film, gaming worlds take you to alternate place, where you experience something very different other than sitting on your couch. In fact the most common feature of the best video games available today are those that allow players to easily lose themselves in the game. Now for obvious reasons virtual reality kicks this up a notch because when wearing the goggles your visual field is obstructed so you can only see what’s coming in through the head gear.
- But the ultimate sense of presence comes from dreams. Dreams aren’t real – you didn’t go anywhere – you were asleep in your bed….. or on the bus…. But they certainly have the ability to feel real. If you’ve ever had a nightmare and woken up terrified and were unable to shake that uneasy feeling for the rest of the day then you know just how real dreams can seem and they can have a lasting effect. Dreams give us unique access to the experience of presence in an unconscious state. Now Akshya will come back and talk to you about the methods section…… Akshya.
- Jus like Ann’s study, all our participants were female undergraduates between 17 and 25 yrs of age with the same restrictions Initial survey included demographics, media use and telepresence knowledge There were two parts to the participation; an in-lab session and an at-home response.. During the in-lab session, participants played the games and answered the survey which included a report of the most recent dream they could remember before coming into the lab. The at-home response is a survey including dream report of first dream after lab session
- What we did differently from Ann’s study is that we added the group of participants who reported their recent dream before playing the game, in both rift and control condition. We did this because we wanted to methodologically control for whether playing the game had any effect on dream recall. So We had 2 conditions; the rift condition and control condition and within both conditions ppt either reported a recent dream before game play or after. All the participants then reported their first dream after lab session
- So for our pre-game group, participants reported their recent dream, rated presence felt during the dream, and the played the game, half of the pre-game group playing with the rift and other half plying in PC mode. They rated presence felt during the game as well. For the post-game group, participants played the games first, either in rift or control, rated presence felt during and only then reported their recent dream, after which they rated presence felt during that dream. For all four groups, participants went home and reported the first dream they got after lab session, and rated presence felt during that dream as well.
- The games they plsyed was the same as the previous study. They spent 5 mins in the fourth floor apartment and 15 mins in the radial g racing game During both games, the researcher noted outward behaviors, vocalizations and perceived absorption
- First we will talk about the results with presence and then the results with dreams and discuss as we go along. Here is Elisa with the Presence results
- For our first hypothesis question, we asked… does the rift elicit a stronger sense of presence than playing the same games on a standard PC? If you recall from the previous study, Ann had found that participants in the rift condition had a stronger sense of presence than those in the control condition. This is also a consistent finding across other studies. However, we found only a very small difference, in favor of the control condition. So what happened?
- Even though we employed the use of random assignment, random assignment didn’t work its magic in this case. As random assignment is supposed to roughly even out the distribution of odd variables within each group, such as age, race, religious backgrounds, intelligence, and gaming frequency. Fortunately we had asked all participants in the prescreening survey that they took before they were exposed to the lab about their gaming frequency and we were able to see that random assignment just so happened to place the more high end gamers into the rift condition. So while we controlled for this statistically, you can never fully account for the breadth of this much variance with such a statistical maneuver. We think that the reason there was only a slight difference in presence favoring the computer condition was because the rift group was more familiar with VR technology and gaming in general, with all the graphics and what not – we actually had some participants say things like “the reactivity of the game was decent, or the calibration seemed off, or there was a bit of lag but overall it was good considering the technology” and thus it was not as unique of an experience, whereas, those in the computer condition may have had a relatively unique experience, which would have induced a stronger feeling of presence for that group.
- So we looked at presence during gameplay by compared the rift condition to the control condition, and here we compared presence during gameplay by when the dreams were collected, before or after gameplay. Although this finding is marginal, it’s fascinating. We found a main effect for when participants recalled a recent dream. For those who reported a dream before game play had a stronger sense of presence in the game, it seems as though the simply act of remembering a dream and writing it down, seems to prime participants to feel more present during game play, and this held true across both the rift and control condition. This is interesting because as we also saw with Ann’s study where she found that the rift seemed to affect how people remembered their dreams. Putting all this together, we seem to have a reciprocal relationship between dreams and the virtual world, where it’s not just that the virtual world has the ability to affect how you remember previous dreams but the mere act of recalling a dream seems to have the ability to affect your presence in subsequent gaming. So this priming effect seems to go both ways.
- To look further into how the virtual world may have an effect on dream states, we wanted to see if the rift would have a lasting effect on subsequent dreams, so we compared the dreams that were reported in the lab – both the pre and post game dreams - to the dreams that were reported after the lab session. And what we found was a main effect for where the dreams were reported. The felt sense of presence in dreams was stronger when participants reported a recent dream in the lab. This result was probably due to the demand characteristic of being in the lab, where participants wanted to answer favorably, but then when they were at home a day or 2 later, they probably didn’t care as much about being favorable. Which is fair. I get it. However the interaction we see here is still relevant. As you can see, the presence reported in dreams drops considerably for the control condition and less dramatically for the rift condition. This nudges us toward confirming our hypothesis that the rift would have a more profound effect on subsequent dreaming than gameplay on a standard PC.
- Then we compared the dreams that were reported in the lab, those that were reported before and after gameplay. We asked the participant in a single item question “how present did you feel overall in the dream you just reported” and what we got was an interaction that approached significance. Participants in the rift condition reported an increase in presence when they reported their dream after playing in the rift and those in the control condition reported less presence after playing on a monitor. This suggests that exposure to the rift primed the participants to recall previous dreams as feeling more real, which is consistent with Ann’s findings. Now Akshya will come back up and tell you more about dream results….
- We will now turn our attention to the dream content and dream type results.
- Question…. Does the rift elicit more ludic dreaming? Our study shows it does Lucid dreaming is when the person is aware of being in the dream state while still dreaming. The finding of the Sinyard et al study of more SELF reported lucidity in the lab was NOT replicated in our study and this is especially important because here we methodologically controlled for when the dream was asked (1/2 Ss before game play and ½ Ss after) When judges rated the dreams, they were blind to what condition the dream came from. Name of coding, order etc. was removed, So for judges-ratings, there was a main affect between dreams reported in-lab and dreams reported at-home with more lucidity in the in-lab dreams than later at-home. Ore importantly, across all dreams collected both in-lab and at-home, judges rated more lucidity for dreams reported in the rift group. This disconnect between judges ratings and dreamers ratings of a dream is actually quite common in the dream research literature. What we think about ourselves is not always what others think when they read what we have written. Still, our results might be viewed as offering some support for some increased sensitivity to the nature of “reality” triggered by rift/gaming experiences
- 3rd person perspective or observer dreams is when dreamer views dreams from an objective viewpoint as opposed to a first person viewpoint. When self-reporting experience of 3rd person perspective in dreams, there was no difference if the dream report was collected before video game play, as you can see on the graph with pre-rift and pre-control similar to each other If it was collected after game, then there was a large difference between conditions. That is, Rift players were more likely to report 3rd person perspective. As you can see on the graph, post-rift in-lab is higher than the rest. Generally there were more observer dream rated during the in-lab session for post-game dream reports. This is a situation affect where after playing the game, the third person or observer aspect of a dream becomes more salient Again, this supports the idea that simply playing a game with the rift alters perceptions of previous dreams.
- Another kind of dream that was asked about was anightmare. That is a dream that was so scary that it woke up the dreamer. Here condition interacted with when a dream was collected, in lab or afterward. In the rift condition, there was a slight decrease in nightmares reported in-lab compared to at-home. For the Control condition, there was a dramatic decrease of nightmares reported from in-lab to at-home dreams. The marker here was the control group, playing on the computer, who reported their recent dream in the laboratory as more likely to be a nightmare. The other three groups/conditions did not differ as much. This could be explained by the video game history of the rift players. Again while it was controlled for in terms of self reports of video game history frequency prior to entering the lab, that measure may not capture all the effects. So what we may have here is a gaming group who has the benefit of nightmare protection as just explained by Carson and Dylan.
- Presence is a more complex concept that VR lit would indicate. Our study suggests that presence is reciprocal in nature where not only is virtual reality priming how dreams are remembered and subsequent dreams but remembering dream states also primes presence during game play. The results for lucid, nightmare and observer dream reports, as rated by judges, show that being asked about the felt reality of a game may have sensitized participants to report more lucid type dreams which is the apparent control and awareness they had in their dreams. This supports the idea that questioning reality may generalize to related experiences
- This study was an extension of previous research examining how methodological improvements might affect results. The current results show that the technology, whether rift or PC, has some degree of effect on elements of dreams. Our major explanation for the results is that priming the participant with game play under different immersive conditions must also be taken into account as it may have an effect on both the memory of a dream as well as on subsequent dreams. This is really a version of the Game transfer effect Based on our results, it is possible that those who spend much more time in virtual worlds may see a greater effect of lucidity in their dreams. It would be worthwhile to continue looking into Virtual Reality’s effect on the conscious and unconscious mind especially if it continues in its direction to become a popular product.
- Because we had all female participants, this is not a representative sample of the general population. And we know that females tend to differ in how they experience dreams, and maybe even video games There was an experimenter effect where the participants reacted differently to Elisa and myself. Participants may have not understood the presence questions causing them to rate higher or lower