Bodyless Presence: Reconsidering the Minimal Self in Immersive Video

TL;DR

This paper reexamines the sense of presence in immersive video, emphasizing self-location over bodily ownership, and introduces the concept of a self-location-dominant state in XR experiences.

Contribution

It offers a phenomenological reinterpretation of presence in immersive video, focusing on self-location as central to self-experience when body schema is limited.

Findings

Self-location becomes dominant in immersive video experiences.

Agency and ownership are less stable, but self-position remains salient.

Viewpoint motion and direct address influence self-perception as events concerning the self.

Abstract

Immersive video, namely 180-degree and 360-degree video designed to be viewed through head-mounted displays, constitutes a boundary case between interactive VR and conventional two-dimensional video for reconsidering self-experience in XR. It can generate a sense of being there without providing a corresponding body, while allowing only limited sensorimotor contingency through head rotation. From a phenomenological standpoint, this paper reinterprets presence in immersive video not as bodily extension or ownership of an avatar, but as a form of self-experience in which self-location becomes relatively dominant under conditions of reduced body schema availability. This paper calls this condition a self-location-dominant state. In immersive video, the user cannot actively intervene in the recorded environment, and stable agency or ownership is difficult to establish. Nevertheless, events such as viewpoint motion, impact, and direct address are not experienced merely as changes within an image, but as events concerning the position of the self. The minimal self in immersive video is therefore redescribed not primarily as a subject of agency or ownership, but as a self spatially located at a viewpoint while the body schema remains backgrounded. This perspective connects research on presence, the sense of embodiment, and the minimal self, and proposes self-location as a central analytic axis for theorising self-experience in immersive video.