What Is a Virtual Reality Medium?
Grant Tavinor · 2021
To ground the study of virtual reality media as an egocentric and interactive mode of picturing, this chapter analyzes the concepts of a medium and of virtuality. Focusing the analysis on current practice and technology, the discussion explores the various senses in which some object, activity or experience might involve a medium, finding there to be two key related senses that seem almost ontologically primitive to our understanding of the world. Virtuality is itself a contested term, with some views holding that virtual is most informatively contrasted with real, while others find actual as the relevant conceptual contrast. The concepts of virtuality and media, initially separated in this chapter, must ultimately be considered in combination. In practice it is the remediation of the functions or structures of an object, activity, or experience within an unfamiliar or novel medium that comprises the basis of virtualization. Virtual reality media are argued to involve the virtualization of spatial experience and agency.