The rising popularity of extended reality tools like virtual and augmented reality has brought with it a selection of new terms and phrases for companies to understand. Concepts like immersive media and spatial audio are gaining attention at a rapid pace. Before companies can fully take advantage of the extended reality environment, they need to understand what each term means fully.
Agency is a word that’s beginning to show up quite frequently in the XR space. Commonly mentioned in discussions of things like social VR sites, collaborative tools, and AR games, “agency” refers to the level of control or empowerment a user has in a vast reality space. Increasingly, companies from all backgrounds are experimenting with what agency can mean to the user experience in the digital landscape.
As business leaders turn to extended reality is a way of bringing teams together, agency will be an important consideration in collaborative, creative, and productivity tools.
Let’s take a closer look.
Defining Agency in the Age of Extended Reality
There are plenty of examples of “agency” in the extended reality world already. Fortnite, the video game created by Epic Games is becoming a massive environment for digital events because it offers a significant level of agency through first-person interactions and excellent immersion.
For companies creating Augmented, Virtual, and even Mixed reality experiences, agency will be an important consideration to deciding how users are going to interact with an XR system and what kind of benefits they’ll be able to get out of it.
Arguably, higher user agency in an XR environment would potentially drive higher immersion. Agency refers to the ability of a user to influence and control the world around them. With global agency, companies provide users with the power to change their entire experience on a granular level. This takes a lot more processing power and depth than local agency.
Local agency environments simply allow users to influence specific scenes or areas they currently inhabit. For instance, in an AR app, a user might be able to adjust the position of an item they can see on the screen. Local agency offers a good level of immersion for some experiences. For instance, in a collaborative environment, a staff member would only need to be able to interact with a digital document on a table in VR to feel immersed.
In other landscapes, true immersion would require more significant levels of agency. For instance, in the travel landscape, users might like the ability to use haptic gloves to move the sand or touch water at a beach.
Is More Agency Always Better?
Providing agency in an XR space is about giving your customers control and power. More isn’t always better, as the agency your user needs will depend on the kind of experience you’re trying to create. In some environments, too much control will simply make XR environments feel less realistic, and more complicated.
If you’re meeting with your colleagues in a virtual room, you want to be able to interact with the content they share, but you don’t need to change the shape of the room, or transform a chair into an animal, for example. Empowerment is a wonderful way to demonstrate what various kinds of reality can accomplish, but it can also pull the user out of the moment.
Some XR creators even choose to remove the issue of agency entirely. This would involve taking users on a pre-set path and giving them nothing but the freedom to look around as they explore. This is a simpler kind of agency and a much more basic immersive experience, but it can also be deeply effective in its own right. In training environments, for instance, a lack of agency would push the individual to focus on the lesson being taught rather than experimenting with a novel environment.
Choosing the right degree of agency to provide in any space will be a challenging concept for everyone in the XR space. As companies continue to discover new examples of what extended reality can do, agency could be the key to completely changing an experience. For instance, companies could consider giving customers different amounts of local agency and global agency depending on their position within a program, or their role as a user.
While decreasing agency sets the stage for more directive experiences, increased agency empowers more adventurous interactions with a transforming environment.
