Personal Reality

Client: Mark Ogilvie, Jagex <mark.ogilvie@jagex.com>

It is often hard to “read” people in social gatherings. But virtual reality can help us understand the relationship between different personalities and social situations. Your task is to create a virtual reality environment, in which people can create models of their perceived self, using abstract objects of various shapes, colours and sizes to mimic how their self-perception changes under various influences. You might consider aspects of the five-factor model of personality, to assess how these are affected by the personality of other people in the same space. The result will be a new kind of social gathering, allowing people to meet and interact without the guessing games that are usually necessary to interpret body language and subtle social cues. You might add ways to model other individuals, showing how our personal observations differ from other people’s models of themselves, and shape the data to deliver meaningful trends and conclusions to sociologists.