Affectively Engaged: Affect and Arousal Routes of Entertainment Virtual Reality

• Authors: Dan Grigorovici
• Venue: VSMM '01 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM'01)
• Year: 2001

Presence has been discussed in the literature as an essential, defining aspect of VirtualEnvironments, but the emotional aspects of the virtual experience have been generally ignored and conceptualized within the limits of online or web-based environments. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the concept of presence in terms of people 's emotional engagement with 3D-based Virtual Environments (e.g., Cave, fully immersive environments, etc.). Three main theoretical statements are discussed: a). VR environments have the potential of becoming the next, fully "transparent," ultimate mass medium; b). VR environments are associated with presence, which is characterized by high levels of arousals and intensive affect; and c). High levels of arousal and intensive affect are associated with lower levels of ad awareness, which means that peripheral cues will play a more important role in the persuasive process. The finding could be extremely useful for considering Virtual Environments as a new possible advertising medium, in that users are not easily aware of the presence of advertising messages "embedded " in the Virtual Environment. Because affective information processing is stimulated by this medium in a higher degree than top-down, cognitive processing, one effect could be that participants do not have readily accessible the "advertising scripts " usually associated with viewing experiences in classical media, when programming is disrupted by commercial breaks.