Weichen Shen | Non-humanoid Body Ownership: Being a Guide Dog: A VR role-playing immersive game featuring half body control of a guide dog

 
In B. Coleman’s book Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, the definition of avatar is “a computer generated figure controlled by a person via a computer. It is often a graphical representation of a person with which one can interact in real-time” (12). Such interactions between players and their avatars in digital games are relatively more intense. Therefore, most video games offer players diverse avatars to choose from and even allow players to customize their avatars like appearance, personality and skills. When it comes to figures of avatars in role-playing games, mages, knights or rogues are the most common avatars provided by them. There are games that offer more bizarre avatars like animals, but most of them are humanoid. VRChat, a virtual world platform that allows users to interact with others as their own customized avatars. Even such a game that encourages players to represent themselves in diverse avatars has a hidden standard: all avatars have to be humanoid. Soraker argues that “first-person view to be the minimal requirement of virtual reality, since it truly immerses a participant in the virtual reality, far beyond any metaphorical sense” (63). There exists video games that feature non-humanoid avatars like Everything and Stray, but the number of first-person perspective games that feature non-human avatars in virtual reality is extremely limited.
Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness is an immersive VR project based on John Hull’s sensory and psychological experience of blindness. It makes people reimagine what being blind is like and gain a new feel towards darkness. The visuals are not presented with realistic 3D objects, but 3D objects composed of particles of blue light. Such aesthetics are relatively abstract. It might raise people’s empathy with the blind community, but it might undermine the practical significance. Such artistic and imaginary visual representations don’t reflect the obstacles that the blind community faces in public space like tactile paving being blocked, and obstacle free space being occupied. Due to the impossibility to create such experiences faced by the blind community through their own perspective without any abstraction, it raises the question of how to raise people’s awareness of the obstacles encountered by the blind community in public space through the medium of VR.
The key to connecting the exploration of applying a first-person perspective non-humanoid avatar to a VR game and the purpose of raising people’s awareness of the difficulties met by blind people is, a guide dog.