I’m currently making my first VR project for regular collaborators Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA). It has extended my thinking around the notion of immersion, which is such a catch cry these days. There are at least three ‘meanings’ we can ascribe and reflect on. For psychologist and affect theorist Daniel Stern immersion is being in an environment that is very static, unchangeful, with very little incoming stimulus, so that one’s perception is turned inwards to more reflective and introspective tropes. For mixed reality, immersion is the desirable aim of dissolving the edge of the frame, merging screen space and actual space, somewhere between full VR with the environment responding to our movements, and AR with its overlay of the virtual and the actual. To this end, immersion in mixed reality is being very impactful on research for teaching in immersive spaces, etc. Finally, it is useful to think of immersion historically, in light of new media archeologies. When the 19Cth afforded everyday people the experiences of mobile leisure and new ways of seeing through mechanised amusements, train travel and plate glass for window shopping and its mini-me manifestations in ferneries and aquaria, there were opportunities for new modes of lived experience. Blurred vision and vertigo from the speed of amusement rides, all enveloping darkness in dark rides and ghost trains, peering into stereoscopic screens or magic lanterns, all were precursors and prophets of the 20C and 21C obsession with experience and feeling.
This slide is from Martyn Jolly’s website; Martyn is doing an ARC project scoping and analysing national magic lantern collections.
at MOD Productions with co-creator James Brown and developer Michela Ledwidge.