A talk from the Consumer Track at AWE USA 2017 - the largest conference for AR+VR in Santa Clara, California May 31- June 2, 2017. Rafael Brown (Digital Myths): Social VR: Creating Social Presence As VR emerges onto the scene, the new trend is SocialVR. As a phenomena, SocialVR has emerged to combat the early tendency of VR to isolate the user. In an age where devices are Digital, Online, Connected & Shared, and where all VR/AR/MR devices will be online all the time. SocialVR and social growth across VR, AR and MR, is about creating Social Presence. We will explore the components that make up Social VR, and explore the path from Presence to Social Presence. http://AugmentedWorldExpo.com

1. Social VR:
Creating Social Presence
“Being There Together”
Jun 2017
Augmented World Expo 2017
Rafael J.Z. Brown

2. • A veteran game development team, that has become a
Virtual Reality company immersed in VR development
and have helped codify best VRX practices.
• We build Social VR experiences that are deeply
interactive using proprietary technology built around
design principles of:
Virtual Human Interaction Online Simulation (VHIOS).
• We’re deeply passionate about bridging distances
between people using VR and are working to define
what Social VR can become.
Private & Confidential Digital Myths
DIGITAL MYTHS IS:

3. https://medium.com/@blaurel/what-is-virtual-reality-77b876d829ba
WHAT IS VIRTUAL REALITY?
Brenda’s Laurel’s Definition of Virtual Reality
1. Complete surround environment.
2. Affordances for depth perception and motion parallax.
3. Spatialized audio, not just stereo.
4. Affordances for tracking the participant’s direction of
motion distinct from the direction of gaze.
5. The participant’s sensorium as the camera.
6. Natural gesture and movement.
7. Affordances for narrative construction.
8. The principle of action.

4. 3 DIMENSIONS OF PRESENCE
(1)PERSONAL PRESENCE
Confirming the eyes. Fooling the senses.
(2) SOCIAL PRESENCE
Confirming validity through shared experience.
(3) ENVIRONMENTAL PRESENCE
Confirming integration. Integrity & obligation of a
larger world.
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3 DIMENSIONS OF PRESENCE
Heeter, C. "Being There: The subjective experience of presence," Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual
Environments, MIT Press, fall, 1992.
http://commtechlab.msu.edu/randd/research/beingthere.html

5. For good VR, first we have to ensure ‘Presence’. What is presence?
• “A phenomenon enabling people to interact with and feel connected to the world outside their physical
bodies via technology. It is defined as a person's subjective sensation of being there in a scene depicted
by a medium, usually virtual in nature (Barfield et al., 1995).”
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DEFINING PRESENCE
• Presence implies a focus on visuals & passive
sensory data.
• Presence is all about fooling the eye/ear.
• Presence is about Transport, about Being There.
• Presence is mostly VR Hardware focused.
Personal Presence is what people most commonly refer to as ‘Presence’.

6. What can Create PRESENCE?
• Currently only on PC VR/Console VR
• Not yet Mobile VR/WebVR
What is needed for PRESENCE?
• FOV 100º degrees
• Resolution 1k per eye (1080p or better)
• Low pixel persistence (3 ms or less)
• Refresh 90 hz
• Illuminated Global Pixel Display
• Advanced Optics & Calibration
• Precise Tracking (mm accuracy)
• Roomscale Volume 10’x10’
• Low latency 20 ms
• --[Mike Abrash while at Valve]
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CREATING PRESENCE

7. Defining Social Presence
• If Presence is about Being There, then Social Presence is
about Being There Together.
• Users rely on representation, physics, motion, communication
and interaction to confirm that they are someplace new,
together.
• Confirming the validity of being transported together.
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DEFINING SOCIAL PRESENCE
“The premise of social presence is simply that if other people are in the virtual world, that is more evidence that the world
exists. If they ignore you, you begin to question your own existence.” (Heeter 1992 MIT)
Social presence refers to the extent to which other beings (living or synthetic) also exist in the world and
appear to react to you. This is in some respects a subset of personal presence, discussed separately to draw
attention to the power it may have in enhancing presence. Social presence may derive from conversing with
other human beings, or from interacting with animated characters. Someone or something else which seems to
believe that you are there may help convince you that you are there.

8. Private & Confidential Digital Myths
SOCIAL PRESENCE THEORY
Social presence theory was developed by John Short, Ederyn Williams, and Bruce Christie, although
its main thesis and major points would appear to have been first described twenty years previously
in the 1956 Isaac Asimov novel The Naked Sun.
“the degree of salience of the other
person in the interaction and the
consequent salience of the interpersonal
relationships.”
A more modern definition of social
presence theory was refined by
Gunawardena (1995) to state,
“the degree to which a person is
perceived as a 'real person' in mediated
communication.”
https://www.mnsu.edu/its/academic/isalt_social_presence_theory.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory

9. Defining Social VR
• Existing Social VR is a roughly 0.5 to 1.0
of where we want to go to.
• Transport Users Together.
• Being There Together
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SOCIAL VR
Why Social VR Now?
• So that it doesn’t feel so isolating to put on a VR HMD
• A natural outgrowth of Social Media & Mobile
audience expectations going into VR.
• Works against the initial isolation of user transport into
another world.

10. Private & Confidential Digital Myths
THE WOBBLY TABLE
https://vhil.stanford.edu/pubs/2016/the-wobbly-table-
increasing-social-presence-via-physical-virtual-object-
mediated-interaction/
http://cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/Lee2016aa.pdf
The Wobbly Table: Increased Social Presence via Subtle Incidental Movement of a Real-Virtual Table
The aim of the wobbly table experiment is to examine whether
subtle incidental movement of a real-virtual wobbly table can
increase presence and social presence. For that purpose, we built
a wobbly table spanning a real-virtual environment. The table
serves as a medium by which incidental interactions with the
table can be conveyed in the form of subtle table movement felt
by a real and virtual human in a dyadic interaction. The table
slightly wobbles depending on the weight both a real human
(RH) and a virtual human (VH) put on it, and the wobbly motion
in real/virtual parts of the table is synchronized.

11. Private & Confidential Digital Myths
SOCIAL VR SPACE
https://medium.com/@basement_vr/vr-communication-cf139e6cbc19
MOBILE VR

12. Social
Low
High
SOCIAL INTERACTION IN VR
Interactivity
Low High
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MILITARY
ACADEMIA

13. Private & Confidential Digital Myths
LENS or FOUNDATION
• ONLINE/NETWORK
• Multiple users
• Device/platform agnostic
• VR & non-VR virtually together
• Online ALL the Time
• Sync & Async
• Server & Cloud
• VRX (UI/UX for VR)
• Abstraction between player & character
• Posture, controls, controllers, calibration, audio,
haptics, motion, navigation, interfaces, text,
gesturals
CORE ELEMENTS
1. INTERACTION
2. EMBODIMENT
3. EMERGENCE
4. COOPERATION
5. COMMUNITY
6. COMMUNICATION
7. CUSTOMIZATION

14. Private & Confidential Digital Myths
SOCIAL VR 0.5
ONLINE
(early dev)
SOCIAL VR 1.0
ONLINE
VRX
(first
commercial
launch)
SOCIAL VR 2.0
ONLINE
VRX
Some Core Elements
(now)
SOCIAL VR 3.0
ONLINE
VRX
ALL CORE ELEMENTS
• INTERACTION
• EMBODIMENT
• EMERGENCE
• COOPERATION
• COMMUNITY
• COMMUNICATION
• CUSTOMIZATION
(Mainstream)
PAST 2016 2017-2019 2020-2025 FUTURE
SOCIAL
PRESENCE
PERSONAL
PRESENCE
SOCIAL VR 4.0
HYPER REALITY
(Ubiquity)
ENVIRONMENTAL
PRESENCE

15. Network
Digital
Online
Connected
Shared
Physics/Objects
Cooperative
Replayable
Emergent
Systemic
Heuristics
Hand/Body
Visceral
Tactile
Physical
Motive
Representative
VRX
Immersive
Interactive
Intuitive
Intimate
OUR APPROACH TO SOCIAL VR
True SocialVR = a Virtual Human Interaction Online Simulation (VHIOS)Private & Confidential Digital Myths
(INTERACTION)
(SOCIAL) (EMBODIMENT)
(VR/AR)

16. Digital MythsPrivate & Confidential
CONTACT INFO & QUESTIONS?
Rafael Brown
Co-Founder
Digital Myths
rafael.brown@digitalmythsstudio.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelbrown/