Consideration of a possible use of virtual reality technologies in school contexts requires gathering together the suggestions of many scientific domains aimed at understanding the features of these same tools that let them offer valid support to the teaching–learning processes in educational settings. Specifically, the present study is aimed at creating a theoretical framework for the didactic use of VR technologies in schools, highlighting the characteristics of these tools that are supported by a view of teaching that enhances sensorimotor activity in learning. The theoretical approach, through the study of the international scientific literature on this topic, offers interdisciplinary suggestions for realising teaching–learning practices that are supported by scientific principles and a concept of learning that is consistent with the processes that these tools may activate.

Some of the problems faced by Cybertherapy along the last two decades are far from being restricted to technical issues. They entail new challenges of medical education, mainly related with the adequate insertion of new technologies in therapeutic processes without distorting the relation between medical professionals and clients. We contend that the acknowledgment of the effects of the systemic effects of therapeutic applications of virtual reality is not fully predictable and can only be achieved attending to the way the patient enacts certain tasks oriented by goals. Enaction means the patient is placed at the centre of the treatment processes, not only as an informed agent, but also as the agent of change through practice. Focusing on the requirements of Cybertherapy applied to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, we propose a theoretic reflection on the conditions of training and treatment in virtual settings. We underline the decisive role of Health Care professionals in applying and improving the potentialities of biometric sensors, graphic and aural engines in virtual (and hybrid) settings. This role can only be adequately understood within a framework of different levels of recursion of the therapeutic system. Two main levels are referred, the first encompassing the patients adaptation and learning to “move within” the interfaces, the second requiring a reflection on the architecture and design of the physical setting and the computerized rendering of sensory data. Further levels concern the larger framework of therapy, relating to its allocation of resources and the social ends that therapeutic technologies, particularly those concerning mental health, must accomplish.

This paper seeks to identify, clarify, and perhaps rehabilitate the virtual reality metaphor as applied to the goal of understanding consciousness. Some proponents of the metaphor apply it in a way that implies a representational view of experience of a particular, extreme form that is indirect, internal and inactive (what we call “presentational virtualism”). In opposition to this is an application of the metaphor that eschews representation, instead preferring to view experience as direct, external and enactive (“enactive virtualism”). This paper seeks to examine some of the strengths and weaknesses of these virtuality-based positions in order to assist the development of a related, but independent view of experience: virtualist representationalism. Like presentational virtualism, this third view is representational, but like enactive virtualism, it places action centre stage, and does not require, in accounting for the richness of visual experience, global representational “snapshots” corresponding to the entire visual field to be tokened at any one time.

Key words: presence, virtual reality, expectations, representation, enactivism, externalism, internalism, perception, enactive perception.

Progressive embodiment and the subsequent enhancement of presence have been important goals of VR researchers and designers for some time (Biocca, 1997). Consequently, researchers frequently explore the relationship between increasing embodiment and presence yet rarely emphasize the ties between their work and other work on embodiment. More specifically, we argue that experiments manipulating or implementing visual scale, avatar customization, sensory enrichment, and haptic feedback, to name a few examples, all have embodiment as their independent variable. However, very few studies explicitly frame their work as an exploration of embodiment. In this paper we will leverage the field of Embodied Cognition to help clarify the concept of embodiment.

Key words: human-computer interaction, presence, embodied cognition, virtual reality.

This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of artificial life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly integrate the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from the environment. This proposition does not however, resolve that of the relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making) Such reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues, thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways.

Key words: enaction, embodied-embedded ai, sense-making, co-evolution, guidance, phylogenesis/ontogenesis ratio, human in the loop, virtual reality

One of the central questions of present-day philosophy concerns the link between “language” and “world.” The aim of this essay is to question this link and its assumptions and to develop a non-dualistic view within the context of “virtual reality.” The utility of such a non-dualism is demonstrated in an interdisciplinary discourse in the context of the epistemology of radical constructivism, in the context of current reflection on “consciousness,” and in the context of the neuroscientific and philosophical question of how it is possible that the on/off-principle of neurones conveys “consciousness of something.”

Over the last few years, the efforts to reveal through neuroscientific lens the relations between the mind, body, and built environment have set a promising direction of using neuroscience for architecture. However, little has been achieved thus far in developing a systematic account that could be employed for interpreting current results and providing a consistent framework for subsequent scientific experimentation. In this context, the enactive perspective is proposed as a guide to studying architectural experience for two key reasons. Firstly, the enactive approach is specifically selected for its capacity to account for the profound connectedness of the organism and the world in an active and dynamic relationship, which is primarily shaped by the features of the body. Thus, particular emphasis is placed on the issues of embodiment and motivational factors as underlying constituents of the body-architecture interactions. Moreover, enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of architectural spaces singles out the two-way bodily communication between architecture and its inhabitants, which can be also explored in immersive virtual reality settings. Secondly, enactivism has a strong foothold in phenomenological thinking that corresponds to the existing phenomenological discourse in architectural theory and qualitative design approaches. In this way, the enactive approach acknowledges the available common ground between neuroscience and architecture and thus allows a more accurate definition of investigative goals. Accordingly, the outlined model of architectural subject in enactive terms – that is, a model of a human being as embodied, enactive, and situated agent, is proposed as a basis of neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.

This is column number nine in the series. We take as our theme the recent movie “The Matrix.” The Matrix is a cinematic exercise in virtual reality and virtual logic. It is not necessary to have seen the film to read this essay. The Matrix is all around you. It is in the air you breathe, in the ground you walk on, in the sights you see and in the feelings that you feel. You yourself are composed of it just as much as it is composed of you. You imagine yourself to be an observer independent of the Matrix, but the very possibility of your observation, your sense of Self and World is produced by the Matrix.

Purpose: To argue for the need to generate a third-order cybernetics to deal with the problematics of second-order cybernetics. Problem: The recent exponential increase in the use of the internet and other “media” to influence and shape dominant cultural experiences via “virtual reality” exploits a core facility of human psychology - that of being able to accept “substitutions” for the “Real Thing.” In this paper, I want to raise some basic questions and dilemmas for our living in the space of a third-order contextualisation that uses “virtuality” in an ever-increasing manner for the configuring and homogenisation of human experiences. In doing so, I also raise the question of the need for us to develop an adequate model of a “third-order cybernetics” for dealing with the ways in which human experience is contextualised and configured by phenomena that constitute the third-order system. Solution: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s work makes it clear that psychologists and others enter into a great deal of confusion when they use terms like “self,” “consciousness,” “emotions,” “memory,” “the environment,” and even “experience,” because, as he points out, there is no convincing model for any of these commonly taken-for-granted phenomena of human living. His writings are taken as a unique source for the generation of an effective third-order cybernetics where the need for constant self-critical monitoring in regard to psychological praxis and third-order phenomena may take place. “Self-critical monitoring” means, in the first place, monitoring in a critical manner our tendencies to take for granted the notion of “self.” One of the main problematics to deal with in second-order cybernetics is the way that “subjectivity” is taken for granted. Benefits: The temptation to collapse back down from a second-order cybernetics to first-order cybernetics will be resolved by creating an effective platform for third-order cybernetics that problematises the issue of “subjectivity” of the observer in the second-order cybernetics framework. This involves putting into question many of the common assumptions held about “who” it is that makes the observations at the second-order cybernetics. In other words, I attempt to highlight what is problematic regarding the observer’s subjectivity and how this analysis of what is taken for granted by the second-order cybernetics framework creates the basis of a framework for a third-order cybernetics.

Key words: subjectivity, observer, self, rational knowing

This article questions the belief that the IT revolution enhances human cognitive development. Starting with a brief description of an alarming tendency observed over the past quarter century, I will identify two major methodological pitfalls of modern education responsible for a profound lack of understanding of the nature and role of language as human ecology on the one hand, and information and information technologies as part of this ecology, on the other; this lack of understanding accounts for the steady decline in the development of young intellects in the information era. To curb this developmental regress, we must change the perspective both on language and information by using a systems approach to humans as linguistic organisms. Such an approach involves identification of the biological function of language as a cognitive-semiotic ability to take into account what is not perceptually present and its relation to sapience. It is argued that this ability (operations on first-order abstractions) is the biological (neurophysiological) basis for abstract thought which is further radically enhanced with the advent of writing (operations on second-order abstractions). The cognitive dynamics of reading and writing reconstruct language as a cognitive domain of interactions, giving rise to a new way of thinking based on the experience of interpreting inscriptions. IT-generated virtual reality deprives young individuals of the essential formative experience of operations on second-order abstractions, impeding their cognitive development.

Key words: education, cognition, language, living systems, abstract thought, reading, world construction.