Twilight of virtualities: Imagining and playfulness in an ambiguous virtual reality

This thesis aims to challenge current critical visions of virtual reality and their drive for immersive experiences. Academic literature and popular culture are predominantly interested in how the technology of virtual reality can convince users they are in a different world. This steers contemporary technological design, improving the VR experience, as that it supports futuristic fantasies of for instance the Metaverse, with Mark Zuckerberg being one of its latest advocates. To virtually exist elsewhere. This thesis argues that the immersive goals of virtual reality rely on a problematic conceptual leap of the imagination: virtual realms and experiences are persistently imagined to be somewhere else, completely disconnected from being here. This separative thinking, which is shaped by modern ideas about technology and the imagination, creates a rift between virtual experiences and everyday experiences. To address this discrepancy, this thesis looks to reconceptualise virtual reality and ask what virtual technology can do for imagining in everyday life. Its conceptual analysis uses the historical framework of modernity to show alternative modes of virtual thinking. It presents the idea of a phenomenological virtual reality, which, based on the philosophical definition of the virtual, describes the ambiguous way consciousness and everyday surroundings interconnect with each other. To virtually exist here. Through the novel concept of aspersion, an alternative to immersion, the thesis argues for a cognitive sprinkling, in which imagining fleetingly overlaps with memory and sensory impressions. Virtual technology can playfully support such an aspersive experience and help us becoming closer to our everyday surroundings. This conceptual approach is furthermore strongly transcultural: Japanese technological, cultural, and philosophical perspectives are used to reconsider virtual reality. They help to deepen the conceptual language of this thesis’s alternative virtual framework, as that they bring about a better symbiosis of cognition and virtual technology in modern everyday life.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wolverhampton

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Berghege, Max Cornelis Johannes

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Groes, Sebastian

• virtual reality
• virtuality
• imagination
• transcultural
• Japanese studies
• ambiguity

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence

• https://wlv.dspace7.openrepository.com/bitstreams/7e9ca546-2e54-4b9e-877b-277c81a5e923/download