Blended origo — Deixis in virtual reality

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.