Keywords

1 Introduction

A point of view in the world is more than a place in space or a way of thinking but also how the place in space is, in a way, an integral part of thinking itself. Capabilities afforded by current tools emphasize the need to better understand the situation of the body in space and the spatialized mind where “the debate must be moved to the concrete realm of seeing exactly how the animate body in its world is a mind” [1]. From this approach I will look at point of view as a situated mind, encompassing body and environment in the anchoring of subjectivity, and with it defining the scale or realm where a thought exists and the parameters that articulate it. This is an important aspect that needs to be integrated in the design process because it involves the body as a measure for experiences that are virtual in nature and need to be understood from the inside. In this regard, designing from the outside at different scales, as was commonly done when drawing, working in front of a screen or building small scale models to preview what a large sculpture or architectural construction would feel like, may have skipped elements that are just now coming into play for objects of representation such as those involving elements of Virtual and Augmented Reality.

When architect Juhani Pallasmaa expresses that “experiencing loneliness is one of the basic feelings given by architecture” [2], I see this as signaling the boundary of the body, a visualization of the scale of the point of view from the body of the person, expanding the body to space, and when you do that, it is indeed a lonely experience. There is no dynamic feedback, but the loneliness of the lack thereof. But then this is the situation of a dynamic body in a static architectural context where the body controls its location in relation to the environment, and the focus is on the mapping of the body into that space. On the other hand, the affect we develop over the span of segments of our individual lives comes from interacting with each other and with the environments of each other including our internal constructions when sharing our experiences. We are not fortresses: we act within networks and assemble collective points of view on top of each of our individual ones. I propose points of view are not scalable, and that this is an important consideration in designing immersive experiences and representations in general today. To this end, I will consider the common element across scales that is the point of view.

In this paper I will first mention relevant embodied technologies that have been developed in the spaces we inhabit today, and what current capabilities like tracking mean for the articulation of the point of view and representation. I will then discuss the notions of subjectivity and objectivity, and what a view from nowhere would mean for interaction design. Finally I will go over the design of point of view dependent on dynamics, materiality and abstract reasoning.

2 Embodiment

2.1 About Embodied Technologies

We construct our points of view from the body and through our senses to understand where we are in space and how we relate to what shares space with us because we make meaning from what we experience in context [3]. In this sense the knowledge of our senses comes together to help us create a model that can help us act and navigate [4]. Even when someone organizes their senses in an atypical manner, we do not walk or see the same way, we can compare our individual models of space with each other which are built from the available and specialized senses each of our bodies have. Such is the case of the blind man who uses tongue clicks as a sonar to “see” [5] or a person who measures space without walking but using a wheelchair instead. Even with these corporal reconfigurations we can confirm with each other as to what is the structure, the materiality and the significant forms that can be perceived in a shared location, all while maintaining our separate points of view and unique life experiences.

Existing in a city, on the other hand, could be described as moving through a series of constructed points of view to be navigated for a desired functionality, open spaces bounded by walls, mediated by windows and open through doors and passages. Architect Pallasmaa sees phenomenology as the observing of conscious phenomena, that is, looking at architecture from within the consciousness that experiences it: “the relationship between architectural form and how architecture is experienced” where “form only affects our feelings through what it represents” (as artistic dimension) [6]. He also observes that when there is no coupling resolution between the body and the representational form, it does not stand as form anymore. Cities are in a way action driven and pieced together devices that choreograph our points of view even as we retain agency within the established constraints that invite certain kinds of body affective states. Cities in themselves are, from this approach, a kind of media, as they mediate actions in an environment.

Because immersive environments such as Virtual Reality experiences can also constrain and choreograph actions and affective states directly and dynamically (even in abstract or extended situations such as in those of scientific visualizations at microscopic and macroscopic scales), we must consider what a point of view represents when handling objects and embodying being in those and other inaccessible or impossible environments. What are the capabilities one can have in spaces that are beyond human scale or are purely mathematical or based on data? What does it mean to navigate molecular or cosmic visualizations as if one was swimming in a calm sea? What does a point of view in those environments mean for our senses and our concepts? What aspects of reality inform the point of view one holds that grounds both our concepts and metaphors?

For example, I had this idea over a decade ago when I started working in Virtual Reality, imagining what it would take to create a perceptually real and embodied virtual experience of looking at the Earth’s surface from above (as opposed to standing in a room with a hand-held controller pressing a button to move over the planet). In a way, airplanes today work as sensory chambers that replicate the atmosphere at the ground level, and aside from some discomfort, passengers forget they are flying because the air temperature and pressure are stable. At the time I envisioned a transparent swimming pool in the belly of an airplane that would indicate to the body the kind of affordances available from the familiar setting of being held by an element that would approximate the suspended feeling of flying, yet with a point of view extended by an airplane in high altitude. This experience is not that different from that of living in a house in a city where shelter, sustenance and mobility are all potentially mediated, but have become so ubiquitous that we forget how this has happened. Living in the Midwest where freezing winters are followed by scorching summers, I could not help but feel naked when inhabiting a house in Hawai’i where I would sleep with opened windows year round, listening to the ocean, the trees, the birds and the frogs which connected me closely to the weather and the state of the ocean waves. When reviewing ways in which our experiences are mediated within architectural constructions that afford navigation and orient attention, or through interactive devices that accommodate and reflect or reconfigure the body, I have turned to consider these aspects as four distinct areas, which can modulate one’s point of view within virtual experiences [7]:

  1. (1)

    What establishes place in space in relation to the environment? This includes depth cues predominantly through stereography, motion parallax and differential size, which form a spatial hierarchy from one’s location in relation to the distance that separates said location from other points in space.

  2. (2)

    What one can afford in terms of visual field, reach and dexterity? This forms the scope of one’s actions that bound a focus of attention on a kind of actionable task or tasks.

  3. (3)

    What one can do and what one can infer about oneself from interacting in the environment? This gives an understanding of the role one can play in the environment.

  4. (4)

    How does the environment signal that one is present in a space? Can one’s shadow be seen? Do the objects in the environment respond to the amount of force exerted on them? Do ripples or waves appear or objects move when one is in proximity or acting upon them? This is the feedback of the environment that gives a sense of agency to one’s motion.

I have purposefully explained these four aspects in very broad terms because there are many ways in which they can be addressed. These aspects set the spatial relationships, the sensorimotor constraints, the role driven identity and the sense of agency of a point of view of embodied technologies.

2.2 The Tracking Shift

Experiencing “requires the recognition that perception is a way of encountering not only how things are, but how things are in relation to the perceiver” [8]. Philosopher Alva Noë further states that experiences in the real world are themselves virtual because we build models of the world in our minds as we navigate space. In three dimensions we see three-dimensional things over time when we move around and through forms in space. We do not see all sides of these forms at once but instead retain an understanding of them as we navigate and look at forms over time. In this regard the point of view is always moving and at the same time held by the reconstruction of form that is dynamically built in our minds when the body surveys the moving focus of attention.

When considering point of view, it is important to look at the different levels of awareness that access perception. Consciousness is but the top layer which in itself utilizes only the part of the experience that is deemed relevant in a kind of “cinemalike editing choices that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted” [9] over what is happening at a given time. In this regard, film is not a restricted or collaged view of an environment, but perhaps a kind of pre-edited borrowed point of view.

Tracked media involving shifts in the visual field attached to body motion presents a contrast to older media that is not tracked, where the point of view in a painting or a photograph is fixed, or where a point of view in a film does not rely on the movement of the body of the viewer. Tracked media does however rely on the attentional capabilities one has regarding number and complexity of forms and the speed at which forms are displayed in the visual field afforded by the tracked device being utilized.

The design implications of tracked media expand static imagery and film to use notions of architecture or constructed landscapes where body motion is paired to visual change. In this exchange the body brings in its whole world experiential library and echoes the motion internally: “Just as your brain predicts the sights, smells, sounds, touches, and tastes from the world in relation to the movements of your head and limbs, it also predicts the sensory consequences of movements inside your body” [10]. Architectural visual change entails spaces that reveal aspects of the environment as one moves inside a building or a garden via body motion such as steps. Tracked media also expands on how an environment can respond to said body motion, thus reinforcing the tracked movements as points of sensation and then articulating the body as a structure of those connected sensorimotor points. In this manner, the points of tracked motion can strengthen the role of the body as a simulation of the space around us.

3 Subjectivity and Point of View

3.1 Subjectivity

Humans directly inhabit space in many ways, both for internal and external spaces and within different scopes of spatial and temporal realms. We also can live in many distinct places simultaneously through real time video and data. Because of this, we live at many scales simultaneously just so we can handle how our point of view moves around these different mediated and non-mediated spaces and manage time, oriented to various actions. We check the geographical weather forecast to decide on certain activities, choose based on planetary seasons to travel, evaluate travel times to decide on how to get places around town, perhaps organize our calendars distributing segments of our lives for work, friends and family or personal projects when privileged to do so, thus organizing our lives’ timelines on different spaces at various scales, and around certain activities that involve a world that humanity has constructed to different extents. And in all those spaces and activities we hold a point of view tailored to the environment and focused on the action which informs our individual subjective experience. One of these realms is the grand scale of the cosmos which involves abstractions of space and time that afford us to consider spatial and temporal relationships that we cannot directly experience from the spatial and temporal bounds of the human body and human civilization.

Just as the body is grounded on the floor on which one steps, so is the subjective character each of us projects grounded in one’s experience. But when that experience expands to encompass a realm where many bodies are present, which overlaps the point of view of those bodies, the point of view becomes physically collective. A physically collective point of view can be that of a static or dynamic point of view such as being at the top of a mountain, or traveling on a car, a boat, a spacecraft. Understanding how planetary motion occurs gives access to understanding that one is traveling around the sun on planet Earth. When utilizing immersive scientific visualizations to understand such dynamics, the point of view becomes a wider collective experience where human mobility is much more abstracted. In that sense, cosmic spatial simulations can detach us from planet Earth to fly between planets and galaxies within scientific visualizations, while in reality we are attached to our planet, and not able to go outside our planet’s atmosphere without machines that replicate our environment in order to keep our human bodies alive, and even then, we cannot go very far.

As someone working with points of view at various scales in immersive media and scientific visualization, I have devoted several years to thinking about what a physical point of view is and how it relates to subjectivity, a subjective point of view that is today extended to the microscopic and macroscopic. In extending subjectivity, “the body is best conceived as the rock on which the protoself is built, while the protoself is the pivot around which the conscious mind turns” [11]. Even in building civilization, aspects of direct experience have constrained the sensorimotor capabilities of the human body to streamline representation to the limits of the available media capabilities, therefore simplifying and modulating a sense of embodied subjectivity that is then flattened to variables which may loose the grounding of the specific point of view that anchors the relation to the scale of said subjectivity. For example, in architectural space, the scale of a room signals what affordances the room may have – whether one can only rest, or whether there is enough room to dance or play a sport, alone or with other people, and the reach that those affordances may have – how far can the environment or the actions of other people be perceived and evaluated. Being in a kind of foggy forest is very different than being in a vast desert or at the top of a mountain. When the sense of scale and reach is lost as an anchoring element in an experience, I would argue that the sense of space is lost in the representation.

Qualifying the point of view at the different scales we use to understand our place in the Universe is also very important because we adopt different characteristics at the various assumed scales. Direct experience affords the body with its sensorimotor potential and spatial navigation. For example, trees seem static in comparison to us humans, because they are attached to the soil, but at a planetary spatiotemporal scale, we are attached to the Earth’s atmosphere for the most part and we share a point of view of space from our corner of the solar system [7]. Conversely, as already stated, we do not share the point of view of another person on the surface of the planet. That is to say, the scale of the geographical location is part of the point of view as much as the point in space itself, and without it, subjectivity is impossible to communicate, as abstracted as it may be. Shifting characteristics across scales that are paramount to the subjective experience in a point of view is problematic for this reason. Not knowing what one’s scale is, is equivalent to not knowing where anything is.

“Without consciousness—that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity—you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think” [12]. Damasio further connects creativity and evolution to subjectivity. Looking inwards, a point of view of situated presence is the axis of our thoughts. Because of the understanding of media, artists know where they are because of the perceptual anchoring of thought.

3.2 Nobody’s Experience

Our own points of view are often so invisible to ourselves that we may think that everybody can see what we see. This leads to not only the generalizing of one’s perception but also one’s experiences, emotions and conclusions about aspects of the world altogether. It can also lead to miscategorizations, such as when assuming one’s subjective view is an objective one, or when a middle ground is declared simply by moving one’s subjective view there.

When Thomas Nagel addresses the excessive objectification of the world, in what he calls “a view from nowhere” [13] he touches on why acknowledging one’s point of view is important. Barret points out that when affect, that is, the general feeling one has in space over time, is experienced without knowing what caused it, it is more likely treated “as information about the world, rather than your experience of the world” [14]. I think it is paramount to consider that acknowledging and understanding the structure and the grounds of our own subjective experience is not only an act of self reflection but it underlies the ability we have to connect with others because we have the sufficient understanding of why we think the way we do and see our individual experiences as rooted in the unique point of view of each of us. It is that understanding that allows us to communicate with each other and compare notes, so to speak, experience together areas of overlap, and transfer aspects of non overlapping life experiences with each other. The physical point of view is a carrier of affect and as Barret states, based on interoceptive sensations where “interoception in the moment is more influential to perception, and how you act, than the outside world is [15] and further expands: “every thought, memory, perception, or emotion that you construct includes something about the state of your body: a little piece of interoception [16].

Interactive experiences such as those of Virtual or Augmented Reality afford us to play with points of view in a more fluid manner than with other media, and even share a human sized point of view in different virtual realms. These are the media of the point of view, tracked and with agency that show and bring to the forefront the simple fact that different points of view do exist and that there are boundaries to perception and the attention handled by it. It is in the simulation of this point of view being transferred to the devices we handle, to the vehicles we drive, and to the digital simulations we create that have the same root of the body. It goes without saying that each of us inhabits a unique point in time and space, with unique experiences that have informed us to that point. Yet the resulting complexities of both commonalities and exceptionalities in the human experience are not easy to reconcile among people. More so, it can be overwhelming just to accept that the same experience can be understood in a slightly different manner by different people. Even extrapolating from the physical commonalities of the body and the planetary environment, the point of view of direct experience is always different.

Perhaps it is this new ability to navigate virtual experiences in sensory rich environments that makes us feel we can navigate everybody’s experiences, as if we could force others into our shoes at will, assuming they experience what we experience and do so in the same way. Such a miscalculation may also be enabled by the assumption that these environments are like a common language that, like spoken language, has the modularity of words which hold fixed meaning which can be confirmed in a dictionary. How the meanings are agreed on when experiences are becoming so natural and synchronized to the kind of body we hold as a species can be confusing. A problem with point of view replacement can be the over-engagement with emotions, the mislabeling of emotions, and the overriding of one’s own experience with these assumptions. Part of media education is the constant grounding of what is communicated on one’s own experience rather than the mere comparison of experiences to declare a winner. This is where ideas such as participatory sense making [1] can be useful in articulating the physical grounding of a physical point of view in social behavior.

3.3 Objectivity as Simulation

Objectivity itself is shaken from its pedestal as we become better at defining what we hold in common with others and what we don’t. The process of collectively thinking about reality by joining points of view has then increased in resolution and it can be made more precise, and less of an imposition of one point of view over another. This results in deeper exploration among points of view in the development of a general common view of reality or conceptual model of reality or the experience of reality where individual experiences are not dissolved but aggregated.

How much of what we treat as objective reality, an overarching point of view that applies to many people, is actually objective as opposed to the imposition of a subjective view? How much is actually a common point of view that addresses shared aspects of reality, a transferrable simulation of realities or an extended reality not reachable by direct means but via devices? In the case of extended reality, we share a point of view when we share a space, being that of a vehicle or a large place as in a mountain. But we also own internal models of larger scales of reality as in sharing the same planet that orbits the sun and follows the sun through the galaxy. These larger models or points of views at larger scales are constructed from technologies developed to capture spatial and temporal scales of data that are then resized to the human point of view in time and space. But are these models of point of view objective per se? Or is just that the notion of model needs to be better understood as a working and fluid collective construction with a validity span at a historic scale? [7].

While objectivity can be understood as joined present reality, the concept of biogeography [17] may be useful in envisioning potential mutual modulations of the body within a virtual space. Biogeography studies the distribution of species in geographic space and over geological time. At large timescales it is the evolution of bodies interacting with changing ecosystems which may seem static to human perception. The concept of biogeography in a way allows us to understand the dynamics of physical space in modulating life forms including the human body. It can also help consider how life has changed place and branched out as a result. This concept affords us to understand how aspects of the world we know have diverged from a point in time, therefore giving us a point of view that allows us to scale our umwelt and see through time.

Thich Naht Hanh further invites people to look at the continuum of materiality from which we emerge as a species, from mineral to plant to animal and then human [18]. He uses the word discrimination in setting apart and differentiating, as the opposite of observing the continuity between beings. Observing continuity entails a moving point of view that imagines what is being observed as a point of view looking back at us. It is a simulation exercise of spatial empathy that in action, not only allows us to see what is in front of us, but understand how we are related, and consider what it shows us about who we are.

4 The Designed Point of View

As I have argued before [19] design practice should not and formally doesn’t address individual senses because we are multisensory beings. This is a misunderstanding stemming perhaps from non professional opinions and a misleading notion perhaps stemming from a recent history of excessive media focus that could be understood as the mapping of a single human sense to a specific media as if that sense could have an isolated section of the human brain. This is why it is necessary to move the understanding of designing to perception of space itself, even shared space, anchored by the point of view, better understood as point of perception, since vision arguably carries the farthest spatial range.

Designing a point of view is a kind of map making. Damasio notes that “map-making brains have the power of literally introducing the body as content into the mind process [20]. There is something very architectural and representationally visualizing about this. Attention thus attaches itself to an ongoing simulation effort to put the pieces we know into new constructions of understanding of what we are yet to grasp from the common materiality and dynamics we share with the world, where we ourselves are part of the construction. Point of view is also a social construct. The constructed aspect of it is somewhat more apparent when social network mobility is not average, for example, when there is a handicapped child in the family. In such a case, there is a boundary realignment in the family where there is a perception of less adaptability to physical and social environments and a smaller but more dense friendship network [21].

Observing and understanding is not an experience of mere mirroring. “Natural cognitive systems are simply not in the business of accessing their world in order to build accurate pictures of it. They actively participate in the generation of meaning in what matters to them; they enact a world” [22]. That is to say, we do not replicate what we experience, but create meaning from our experiences. Lisa Barret talks about experiential blindness when we see something for the first time [3]. This is when we have never connected to it. This observation says something about points of view as inhabited spaces, where lack of familiarity renders what is there invisible. Knitting a web of familiarity around a new experience may start by dissecting strangeness into aspects that appear familiar, comparing and constructing the unknown from the known. There is something about this dissecting and constructive activity that makes us build and even carefully design our own point of view that can then be transformed and utilized to look at the world around us and join views with others. This is also an event of “mutual modulation” [1] in doing so. In participatory sense making among points of view there is an “emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, (that emerges) without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved” [23] where autonomy is the point of view itself.

5 Conclusion

The interaction of society with new means of representation and exploration of meaning such as VR and AR have resulted in renewed valuation of understanding one’s own point of view. Current media capabilities also open up spaces to reflect on our personal behavior and the articulation of social interactions as well as the coupling of behaviors into collective points of view. Ongoing new knowledge correspondingly results in confirmed collective experiences of a societal point of view that assess our experience as a species.

The design process for interfaces and for environments has changed dramatically over the last decades. In the past, signage and eventually screen based content was designed for the front view exclusively. Environments used to be designed via floor plans and small scale models that provide an outside view. The ability to design from the inside out, that is, from the point of view, grant us the opportunity to review how visual hierarchy can be now updated to spatial hierarchy with an embedded perceiving and acting body as measure. Furthermore, point of view significantly changes roles and affordances as it is scaled from the human body. This is something we must learn not only to articulate in design, but educate in reading and understanding, so it is correctly mapped back to the body.

Several interfaces in virtual environments appear today in proximity to the body of the user like screens in virtual space receding to the outside view of representation. In the best case they appear attached to body limbs requiring certain arm motions to receive input, while in real life consumer devices are relatively recently beginning to accept body gestures instead of button pressing commands. I believe this is a transitional period that expands the solely visual experience to a more integrated and multi-sensory one. I expect more work to be done under a likewise integrated design paradigm of perceptual hierarchy, closer to an understanding of perceptual space and a scalable notion of point of view as an axis of agency both individual and collective.

The same way we consider physical context and experience in order to understand each other better, we need to have an understanding of what scale and scope we are at in virtual representations of non human scales in order to understand how the representations relate to us and each other. To that end we must design with an awareness of the connections that our bodies have to the real environment. Point of view-centered design requires an understanding of scale and scope, and how interfaces may stem therefrom.