The Pasts and Futures of Virtual Reality

Summary
The release in 2016 of the consumer version of Oculus Rift marks the beginning of a new era in VR. For our purposes, this technology offers a point of reference in relation to which the possible futures of VR technologies can be explored, while bringing these futures into dialogue with some of the histories of VR – in literary and theatre studies, art history, screen studies, and game studies.
Our areas of interest include the use of virtual realities to manage, extend, and double reality in Enlightenment, Romanticism and contemporary culture; the changing relations between fiction and reality (fictionality and referentiality); the exchanges between disenchantment and re-enchantment in ‘modern’ cultures; performance / story-telling on stage and on the Holodeck; the contemporary reinvention of invention, through interactivity and sociability, which ties imagination (and imagined realities) closely to the production of commodities; vicarious travel in fiction, on stage, and digital virtual realities; the fabrication of geographies or architectures of the imagination, from Walpole and Sterne, to Blake and Beckford, Lovecraft and Tolkien, and the interactive role-playing games of today; and so on.
Investigators
Professor Peter Otto (University of Melbourne)
Professor Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University)
Themes related to this project
Research projects
- Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds
- Azuchi Screens Research Network
- Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation
- British Romanticism and colonial modernity in India, 1780-1840
- Climate Science Denialism and its populist Analogs
- Critique, Creativity, Innovation
- Extremism and the Australian Imaginary
- Gothic Fictions: Emotion, Contagion, and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity
- Human Kind: transforming identity in Australian and British portraits 1700-1900
- Islam and the Left in Indonesia and Turkey
- Kenzaburo Ōe and William Blake: Modernity, Romanticism, Japan
- Literary Romanticism and the Media of Romantic Love
- Natural Born Subjects: A Cultural History of Naturalization in Britain and the Australian Colonies, 1660-1850
- New tastemakers and Australia's post-digital literary culture
- Observation and Analogy in Enlightenment and Romantic Natural History
- Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce
- Regency Flash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1788-1848
- Romantic Worlding
- The Butterfly Men of Kuranda: natural history dealers in the 'deep north'
- The George Lyell Collection
- The Past and Present of Sugar
- The Pasts and Futures of Virtual Reality
- Theorising the online anti-public sphere
- War-Widow, Mother, Slave, Refugee: Andromache in Romantic Europe
- William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization
- World Literatures, Theatres and Cultures research network