Virtual Reality: Confinement and Engulfment; Replacement and Re-placement

Abstract

This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Specifically, it interrogates VR’s sense of immersion via two vectors in the post-screen’s “forgetting” of screen boundaries – confinement of a viewer’s visual field with restricted viewing devices; and engulfment by being surrounded with large screens. The chapter’s key idea is its alternative expression of VR’s relations of reality as an immersive media form, which it argues shifts from the critical paradigms of replacement to re-placement. Through theoretical critique and readings of various applications of VR, the chapter argues for re-placement as a more ethical and generative space for thinking through VR’s relations of the real. In turn, where and how the actual and the virtual is re-placed informs the very purpose of media itself.