VR and Immersive Experience

Page 1, MA thesis, 1995

VR and Immersive Interactive Experience

When I say VR in this blog, I mean immersive interactive experience.  I don’t really know that virtual reality means anything, really.  This is what I wrote in my 1995 MA thesis:

Virtual reality is an existence in the domain of cyberspace . . . defined variously from Michael Heim’s critique of VR and cyberspace as an ontological Zen dream, and Arthur Kroker/Michael A. Weinstein’s pseudo-Marxist rant of VR as the ultimate paranoiac’s nightmare, to the hip, pop writing of R. U. Sirius’s version of VR as techno-voodoo funk.  One of the most inclusive definition is Marcos Novak’s . . . This definition is useful in that it defines the limits of cyberspace as a domain, an environment fabricated via computer software and hardware . . . This is merely another in a series of computer interfaces from punch cards and paper tape, to . . . data gloves, headgear and CAVE’s—yet one with exciting possibility.  (pg 32)

So who knows, really?  However, immersive tech is branded today as virtual reality and that’s the way it has been since the glove/visor combo appeared in the 1980’s.  Perhaps once we get away from that particular hardware configuration we can stop calling it VR.  It is not a virtual reality.  It is an extension of 2D computer graphical user interface display into 360 degrees of view with depth and interactivity.  It doesn’t have to remotely resemble reality.  What we call a VR, an immersive interactive experience, is just another part of reality.  When confronted with the technology of photography, then later silent film, people mistook them to be reality for a while.  We will move on.  Until then, I’ll use the vernacular term VR so people will understand what I’m talking about.