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. Enlightenment, Romantic, and contemporary virtual realities are an important although not exclusive
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 (The University of Melbourne)
Professor Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University)
Image: Mikepanhu. Google Glass with frame for prescription lens 2014 CC BY-SA 3.0 PD-US
Themes related to this project
Other research projects
- Architectures of Imagination: Bodies, Buildings, Fictions, and Worlds
- British Romanticism and colonial modernity in India, 1780-1840
- Climate Science Denialism and its populist Analogs
- Critique, Creativity, Innovation
- Gothic Fictions: Emotion, Contagion, and the Transformation of Experience in Modernity
- Human Kind: transforming identity in Australian and British portraits 1700-1900
- Kenzaburo Ōe and William Blake: Modernity, Romanticism, Japan
- Literary Romanticism and the Media of Romantic Love
- Planters, Plantations and the State in the British Caribbean, 1713-1834
- Reconstructing museum specimen data through the pathways of global commerce
- Regency Flash: Britain, Ireland and Australia, 1788-1848
- Slave Narratives in British and French America, 1740-1840
- Slavery, Empire, and the Great Divergence (1690-1756)
- Slavery in British Guiana in the Age of Revolution, 1804-1834
- The Butterfly Men of Kuranda: natural history dealers in the 'deep north'
- The Imperial History of the American Revolution
- The Past and Present of Sugar
- Theorising the online anti-public sphere
- Transatlantic Gardens and Enlightenment Ideas in American Art
- William Blake and the History of Imagination: Poetry, Prophecy, and Secularization
- World Literatures, Theatres and Cultures research network