Abstract
Reality Media reprises the comparative–genealogical method of first author Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1999 book, Remediation. To wit, both books proceed on the basis that “[d]igital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print” (Bolter and Grusin, 1999: 15). Reality Media’s central claim is thus that like film or cinema, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will not follow unilinear evolutionary trajectories but be defined by a phylogenic diversification of form factors, genres, aesthetics, applications, business models, consumption patterns, and effects, “remediating” extant and historic technologies as they mutate and mature.
Chapter 1, “What Are Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality?,” deals with how we can talk about a given medium’s aesthetics. That is, following McLuhan, by considering “the way it conditions our senses” (p. 19). We’re also introduced to the virtuality continuum (Milgram and Kishino, 1994). The virtuality continuum places unmediated physical reality at one end, sensorially enshrouding VR at the other, and gradations of (or variations upon) AR or mixed reality in-between. Where a competitor book, The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (Tavinor, 2021), challenges the ontological assumptions of the virtuality continuum, questioning the cogence and utility of the engineering-derived framework, Reality Media leaves it to the reader to decide the soundness and significance of the taxonomic tool.
Chapter 2, “The History of Reality Media,” walks us through a Eurocentric ancestry of illusion-inducing technologies. Linear perspective, trompe-l'œil, panorama, photography, and film are all present and accounted for, just as in Remediation, Virtual Art (Grau, 2003), and the forecited Aesthetics of Virtual Reality. Across this chapter and the next (Chapter 3: “3-D Graphics and the Construction of Visual Reality”), much emphasis is placed on photorealism, and all instances of media that are not socially or perceptually indistinguishable from reality are hereafter flagged as “uncanny” (cf. Mori, 1970/2012)—a slightly problematic point to which I’ll later return. Other recent discussions of VR stress not realism per se but the susceptibility of the visual system to egocentric visuomotor illusions (e.g., Tavinor, 2021). That is, roughly, feelings of spatial presence enabled by the virtual camera rig reduplicating or “sticking” to the user’s gaze behaviors. This would rightly emphasize the inextricability of perception and action. Bolter et al.’s privileging of visual verisimilitude, perhaps a by-product of their eye to the past, arguably gives the impression that AR and VR function like photographs or film; that active users of immersive virtual environments are cognitively analogous to sedentary viewers of bounded, perhaps static images, evaluating their trueness-to-life mainly on the basis of lighting, surface texturing, etc. This stands in implicit theoretical tension with Chapter 4’s remarkably brief discussion of the phenomenological import of “Degrees of Freedom: Spatial Tracking and Sensing.”
Chapter 5, “Presence,” elects not to review the theoretical state of the art, instead appealing to a multipartite definition of presence from 1997. While Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton’s landmark study of (tele)presence remains relevant today, one would ideally expect a chapter dedicated to the “feeling of being there” (p. 77) to go beyond a single source. Promisingly, the chapter also introduces Benjamin’s notion of an artwork’s “aura”—it would have been nice if the concept reappeared before the book’s conclusion. Chapter 6, “The Genres of AR and VR,” itemizes a plurality of examples, tentatively positing that AR and VR experiences can be classified as either “special” or “everyday” (pp. 121–122)—another proposal that warmly invites elaboration.
With tangential reference to Bazin’s “myth of total cinema,” Chapters 7 and 8 make lucid and persuasive cases for why neither AR nor VR are likely to epitomize corporate visions of ubiquitous, decentralized data structures boasting seamless inter-operability. AR will probably not realize its putatively singular destiny as a virtual “mirror world” powered by a unified “cloud,” and VR will hopefully not, despite Facebook (now Meta)’s best efforts, become Mark Zuckerberg’s ideal “metaverse”—a monopolized panopticon of personal data extraction and unmoderated child playbour.
The Silicon Valley-shaped specter of privacy violations and consumer exploitation pursues us into Chapter 9, “Privacy, Public Space, and Reality Media,” where the book’s most pressing issues are raised. Sections like “AR and VR as Surveillance Media” span several pages and highlight concrete examples that should give us pause, linking them to recent research. Others, such as “Uncanny Spaces,” are shorter than a page. Here, the concept of the uncanny is stretched even further. Masahiro Mori’s (1970/2012) “uncanny valley”—used to describe the sharp roll-off in likeability observed when humanoid figures inspire discomfort or disgust by appearing non-natural—is well delineated and explanatorily powerful. The authors suggest not only that uncanniness is an inherent feature of all reality media, but that their version of the uncanny is a synonym for their previously clear-cut concept of the “La Ciotat effect” (passim)—a hasty equation that blunts both terms.
The La Ciotat effect is otherwise Reality Media’s most tantalizing concept. First teased in the book’s introduction, this is the idea that the story surrounding the Lumière brothers’ 1896 screening of L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, though apocryphal and threadbare, conceals a pithy truth: That we’re oftentimes not “fooled” by reality media (p. xv), but enthralled by the sophistication of advancements in illusionism (Grau, 2003). It would be nice to see this logic developed in the fine grain and with emphasis on the fact that the mind is not monolithic or uniformly accessible. It is difficult to speak of media users as simply “believ[ing]” a representation or not (p. 73), as our perceptual and emotional systems can manifestly be affected in a subdoxastic manner (for instance, by VR-assisted psychotherapy), despite conscious and rational knowledge that we aren’t physically in the depicted environment, or that its virtual objects and agents aren’t “real”—or even remotely realistic. Accounting for this cognitive schism is key to theorizing presence technologies at the individual and societal levels. Indeed, it’s noted with reference to third author Blair MacIntyre’s work that reality media “should not be understood as purely technically driven but rather as founded in a human experience of mediated space” (p. 19—my italics).
Reality Media is a largely descriptive work, brimming with neat observations and analogies. Its frequent examples are diverse, well-chosen, and illustrative. Several budding theories take root throughout, ripe to be picked up in future scholarship. The philosophically inclined might find a rigorous read in The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality. Those who relish a radical, incisive critical analysis could pick up a copy of iMedia (Kember, 2016).
(N.B.: Reality Media has its own “uncanny digital double,” RealityMedia.digital. This is an unfinished companion website that’s meant to let the reader experience the book as a museum-like virtual environment via desktop 3D or headset-based VR. At the time of writing, however, only one room is accessible. Hence, this review has considered only the print book.)
