It all started, and is continuing, with an article in Second Life Creativity named: Augmentation vs. Immersion. It is usually quoted and linked when one needs definitions of immersion and augmentation. That is the one that defines the tribes that usually misunderstands and confronts each other. Wrong!
This article, and a lot of residents after it, defines immersion as:
Your SL and RL identity are two different sides of you that should not mix.
And often, you'll see residents that identifies themselves as immersionists, as avatars who more or less ignore humans behind them, or state the complete difference. Nice, but that is the wrong use of the term. If we check Wikipedia, it says:
Immersion is the state where you cease to be aware of your physical self. It is frequently accompanied by intense focus, distorted sense of time and effortless action.
Which actually means that one is diving deeply into the world and feeling it to its potential. Just like enjoying a good movie or a book. Nothing says that you are supposed to hide your human under the table like you are ashamed of something. On the other hand, augmentation, according to SL creativity article is
that we have to stop thinking about SL and RL as different spaces. Such realizations are at the core of this philosophy.
According to the dictionaries, augmentation is about "an extension", human's extension into the virtual environment. Usually,"augmentationists" will state that there is no difference between their humans and avatars and that avatar is just a representation of oneself in the virtual world.
Last time we spoke about these, we got to the conclusion there is nobody on one of the extremes. We all fall somewhere in a spectrum between those two extremes. But that was because of wrong definitions we started with. Those two are not the extremes of the same spectrum. One, immersionism, is about how good one communicates with the depicted environment. And it largely depends on your imagination and concentration. It doesn't depend much on whether your avatar is looking like your human does. You can be fully immersed with the augmentative avatar. You can immerse with squid avatar too. Or you can do crap job and feel like a human in front of the monitor looking at crappy 3D graphics, no matter if your avatar is a digital representation of you or anything else. It is, after all, your world – your imagination.
But, please, don't bend the meaning of the terms. It just adds to confusion and makes problems where we don't need them. Thank you.
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