Nowadays, the current technological efforts concerning Virtual Reality
are conducted in a double direction: to improve the polysensorial images and
at the same time to create interfaces for total immersion. In theory, and in
the opinion of the most optimistic experts, in the future it will be possible to
conceive a virtual experience, a perfect hologram that would be identical to
reality to the point that it would not be possible to differentiate one from the
other. What Virtual Reality thus changes is the dichotomy between reality
and unreality, the thin line that separates them. We can find new hybrid
forms composed simultaneously by these two notions, because Virtual
Reality, as the name indicates, is indeed configured with a mixture of both
spaces. In Virtual Reality consumers live inside the simulations and therefore
their ‘virtual’ lives depend on the possibilities offered by such (un)reality.
The duality of the real self and virtual representations finds an answer
in films like The Matrix. Paradoxically, this film reconciles both spheres: the
world of flesh and the world of virtuality through their opposition. Neo leaves
his body in the chair, in the real world, to immerse his mind in the
technological world of The Matrix, but the connections with both are obvious:
his body maintains the same appearance in the virtual world and suffers in
reality when it is attacked in the technological environment. The Matrix does
not offer a pleasant possibility but a link, a reason to accommodate both
elements in our lives. Virtuality and reality do not necessarily need to be
opposed; indeed Virtual Reality opens the doors to many fused
interpretations of both spheres and the possibility, as is illustrated in Luna, to
simultaneously inhabit both dimensions with the metaphorical separation of
mind and body: a body that is attached to the real world and a mind
immersed in virtuality.
Jameson (1996) and Pierre Lévy (1999) belong to a group of authors
who believe that we are currently affected by a general movement of
virtualization that is something other than mere ‘computerization’. According
to them, virtualization is a moment, a particular stage in humanity. In this
sense, virtualization is not necessarily good or bad, rather it is just a specific
moment through which technological devices experience ‘otherness’ and this
state proffers its advantages: if we are careful and aware of the risks, we can
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