The diversity of designs and techniques used to build environments around the human perceptual system in order to immerse people in complex synthetic experiences has created a variety of approaches. Some of the experiences may immerse the person in structures that cannot be physically accessed otherwise because of scale or time. Others may bring together different phenomena that do not normally happen simultaneously. In this article I attempt to categorize the kinds of experiences that are being built around our bodies (...) and minds utilizing devices that extend our senses and cognitive structures, thus mediating the way we experience and think to better understand the world around us. (shrink)

Real-time computer graphics and complex sensory input challenge past assumptions of highly constrained metaphors based on static imagery. Access to research and gaming interfaces have popularized the understanding of tracking technologies that tailor interaction to ambulatory displacement and dexterous handling of objects, expanding the realm of metaphors from visual to physical phenomena. But behaviour and the mind have been studied far before there were real-time computer graphics or digitally created synthetic environments. Dynamic relationships between environment, body and thought are being (...) dissected today by neuro-scientific research, and, conversely, synthetic environments are being utilized to address psychological disorders. This article examines research on scientific and philosophical fields that advance the definition of representation, from an image-based realm as limited by previous popular media to an understanding of action and immersion, where attention is activated by change, and rooted in the body. From this perspective, the advent of embodied representation may not be as much of a change of medium, but the perceptual relation with the medium, the medium being a created Umwelt, where the virtual world builds the mind through the body. (shrink)

The synthetic experience can be understood as the natural experience extended through technological means. These means are usually designed to immerse a person or people into a representation of reality, being that reality is one of being immersed in a task, a state of mind or an imagined space, or a combination of them. To represent reality, technology is built around the human perceptual system that connects with the focus of its attention towards the outside world. In handling reality, the (...) human perceptual system also extends inwards, to patterns of reasoning where the structure of the body, that is, the perceptual system itself, models the organization of ideas and interaction. Therefore, a synthetic experience has unique potential to allow for interaction with structures of the mind. (shrink)