Today a growing eco-system of start-ups, scale-ups and incumbent businesses are defining, designing and developing new products, services and experiences to continuously improve the augmented and virtual realities that have become part of our reality. If we extrapolate from the past into the present, we can start to see advances in simulated reality as progress being made on different scales.

If progress reaches a certain threshold, people who are in the simulated reality people are willing to suspend their disbelief – the simulation becomes believable. At an even higher threshold, people forget they are in the simulation and the simulation becomes indistuishable from the real. It becomes natural. Between the believable simulated reality and the natural simulated reality is the so called uncanny valley, a concept first proposed by professor Masahiro Mori in 1970s for the acceptance of lifelike robots. Mori’s insight was that people would react with revulsion to humanlike robots, whose appearance resembled, but did not quite replicate, that of a real human.

The uncanny valley has been proved in scientific pyschological experiments and is taken as advice by designers of life-like robots, virtual avatars and simulated realities but also suggest that progress on simulated reality will be less linear or exponential than we think and follow instead a valley curve.

In the 1990s, Brenda Laurel in Computers as Theatre and Jannet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck among others, introduced theoretical frameworks for understanding the many different flavors of holistic narrative forms in the late 20th century. Murray explains three important concepts to experiencing digital media; agency, immersion and transformation. Agency is described as the pleasure of interactivity which “arises from the two properties of the procedural and the participatory”. Immersion is the “feeling of being present in another place and engaged in the action therein”. Transformation is less easy to understand and is about the ability of the player to transform into someone else for the duration of the game.

To understand progress in immersion and agency we need to distinguish between aided and unaided situations. In the previous chapter we saw several examples of immersive experiences that were carefully prepared and managed backstage so people on stage would forget the human effort behind the scene. Unaided progress is cycling without training wheels. The simulated reality can rely on technology only. We will use the term true immersion and true agency to indicate that unaided progress has reached the level where it has reached or exceeded the human level.

Progress can also be described in more general terms such as the number of users, the average time spent per user and the amount of money users invest to describe the impact of the simulated reality on reality itself. A simulated reality may be high on agency and immersion but if the number of users, the time spent and turnover is low, the simulated reality is not having a large impact on society.

The six dimensions we will use to measure progress on are therefore a combination of the two approaches we outlined above:

• Immersion: The number of senses stimulated at the same time in a coherent way and the level of detail in the information presented to the participants in the simulation. Rich sensory engagement is when you eat a sandwich near a food truck or walk through a field of flowers in spring.
• Agency: The ability to impact the simulation by (un)intentional actions made by the player in the simulation. A high level of of agency requires that players have control over decisions, those decisions have consequences, and players have enough information to anticipate what those consequences will be before making them. Driving a car at high speed on the highway or climbing a rock wall are examples of situations with high agency.
• World size: The size of the simulation. The larger the open world and more varied, the more there is to explore and the less players feel constrained by artificial boundaries.
• Number of users: The number of unique users who log in to the simulated reality in a given time period. A highly social simulation contains millions of users that interact with each other in meaningful ways.
• Time spent: The average amount of time spent per time period in the simulation. The higher the time spent, the more the simulated reality keeps players inside the simulation and is a replacement for the real.
• Capital investment: The amount of money invested and spent in the simulation. The more money spent, the higher the value people place in the simulated reality.