Abstract

Virtual Reality is a hybrid term that refers to immersive and non-immersive forms of interactive Information Technology, as well as the environments these technologies construct. Virtual environments are iconographic representational spaces that propose particular geographic illusions and fantasies. Virtual Reality promotes a long-standing belief that absolute space exerts independent force. However, the technology also suggests that personal control over space can be achieved in a relational or even relative fashion. Virtual Reality makes a semi-explicit claim that it organizes a place within which meaning, nature, and social relations might be experienced. It does so, in part, by recourse to landscape techniques of framing and visual stimulation. ;Virtual Reality tries to make concrete the idea that individualistic social relations might be relocated to an immaterial landscape 'where' military exercises and commercial transactions increasingly also 'take place.' Such a relocation assumes that the act of communication is an adequate substitute for embodied experiential reality, and it exchanges communications technologies for the existential reality of places. ;Immersive virtual technologies are visual spatial metaphors. They synthesize applied science and the meaning of language to construct a 'picture language machine' suggesting that reality is entirely a discursive formation. The spatial display 'within' which users interact with other users and things depends on a software base of codes, number, and boolean logic. Virtual environments imply that users might relocate aspects of self identity to a language practice detached from its embodied origins and reformulated as spatial technology--as if the subject might somehow either physically 'move into' language, or, in schizophrenic fashion, merge with space itself. ;We grasp space through bodily situation. Our bodies are necessary for making spatial and ethical decisions. Real space organizes relationships between things. It contributes to regulating human perceptions--they appear to occupy the same perceptual field. A persistent Idealist belief that human bodies are secondary in importance to the ways they are represented is reflected in virtual environments being culturally positioned as a utopian 'destination' for a disincorporating and fragmented subjectivity