Abstract: Guillaume Perreault-Roy has been working in the fields of virtual and augmented reality for many years, both as an artist and researcher. He is currently creative director (and author) of the VR video game Broken Edge (2022). As someone who has worked hands-on with early immersive technologies (including some prototypes which have been forgotten by most recent histories of the medium), Perreault-Roy developed a set of pillars for discussing technologically mediated immersion. Our discussion served to highlight some of the fundamental factors in the budding fields of virtual and augmented reality, but also to take a look at where these technologies might one day go.

Keywords: virtual reality, immersion, technology, research-creation

How did you get into the field of immersive media?

Guillaume Perreault-Roy (GPR): Since 2014, I’ve been involved in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) in a variety of roles. This was a critical period for immersive technologies and their evolution has informed my creative process. While I now work as a creative director in an indie video game company specialized in VR, I’ve previously worked as a researcher, interactive designer, digital artist, and teacher. I’ve juggled these roles and the technologies, alternating between AR and VR. This plural approach allowed a direct, hands-on appreciation of these technologies and a point of view informed by various perspectives. The potentials and limitations of immersive media are my main interests and I developed a frame of analysis for both.

Back in 2014, I was working in a start-up where I initially designed an AR platform based on the first iteration of the Meta glasses. My main interest, then, until 2018, was presence, since the notion of “immersion” was thrown around a lot at the time, often in a very abstract sense. That's when I undertook an initial research project, with the first iteration of my project Espace & Présence, and when I came up with the idea of the “three pillars of presence” as an analytical framework. The key point of these pillars was to establish common dependencies of the effect of presence, both in augmented and virtual reality.