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Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality

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With virtual reality (VR) -- or at least the promise of it -- fast becoming a fixture in the public imagination, books like this are vitally important in shaping how we think about, make use of, and create future technologies of representation. Drawing from a remarkable breadth of cultural, technical, and philosophical thought, Ken Hillis's Digital Sensations remains direct and accessible as it deftly weaves together theory, insight, and imagination to understand VR as a technology with specific cultural and historical origins (origins that go farther back than computers, TV, even the telephone and telegraph). Hillis makes a passionate, convincing case that these roots influence the way VR is currently used (in everything from military simulations to avant-garde art installations) and, perhaps more important, how it is publicly perceived: as a utopian, anything-is-possible means of escaping our bodies and the materiality of our lives to achieve a kind of electronic nirvana. Recognizing this as a commercial and ideological vision, Digital Sensations positions itself in one sense as an antidote to that hype, calling our attention both to the far-fetched claims of VR visionaries and to the ethical implications of a technology that depends for its effects on a cunning substitution of illusion for place. Yet the book is not a bringdown; if anything, Hillis helps us think rigorously about the implications and potential of VR, counterbalancing the simplistic, domesticated perspective that characterizes VR simply as a new form of mindless entertainment, virtual singles bar, or faster way of commuting to the electronic office. In chapters on contemporary theory as well as histories of optics and vision, Hillis scrutinizes each component of VR (space, place, body, identity, embodiment, language, and metaphor) calling for a careful consideration of what the desire for a "leap into cyberspace" might mean politically for those who go -- and those who are left behind.