Blended origo — Deixis in virtual reality

Karsten Senkbeil
University of Hildesheim

Studies on communication in Social Virtual Reality (SVR) have shown that the immersive qualities of VR — the sense of presence, and a sense of embodiment through increasingly realistic motion tracking and avatars — have an impact on verbal communicative interactions in the new medium. Misunderstandings and moments of linguistic creativity are observable, and many of them revolve around ambivalent locations, doubled ‘bodies’, and issues while coordinating attention, i.e.: they concern deixis. This paper presents the results of a qualitative analysis of deictic terms in verbal interactions in SVR. It demonstrates that the unusual communicative circumstances in immersive VR directly affect a speaker’s origo, the deictic zero-point of orientation in space and time. This paper concludes that the term blended origo may serve as an analytical concept to understand deixis while SVR users communicatively interact in two ‘realities’ simultaneously.

Publication history

Date received: 29 September 2022

Date accepted: 22 April 2024

Published online: 16 January 2025

Table of contents

In the last decades, Virtual Reality (VR) has been repeatedly announced as ‘the next big thing’ in media technology, then not living up to the expectations. Since the early 2020s, important players in the IT market have increased their activities in the field, combining technical improvements and lower pricing with new strategies in terms of marketing and software design to overcome a cultural bias of the past: that VR usage is an isolated, antisocial, lonely activity. The VR industry today focuses on the creation of opportunities for social interaction and communication, work in teams, cooperative gaming and learning: Social Virtual Reality (SVR). The hypothesized next iteration of the internet, the ‘metaverse’, is expected to embed social media functionalities in interactive, location-independent, persistent 3D-environments to be accessed with VR hardware. Once VR becomes less of an isolationistic, and more of a social-communicative activity (in work life, education, and entertainment), it may become a contender to existing forms of social media, and a relevant field for pragmalinguistic analyses of new forms of computer-mediated, (mostly) spoken and (occasionally) written language use.

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