Abstract: Cinema and virtual reality have explored different strategies to visualize so-called out-of-body (and, more precisely, near-death) experiences, where the traditional first-person perspective ends up coinciding, paradoxically enough, with a seemingly disembodied gaze. The observers (in cinema) or users (in immersive virtual environments) get the impression that they are perceiving their own gazeless body, and they therefore feel embodied in a body that is, and at the very same time is not, their own. I maintain that this phenomenon is to be regarded as emblematic of the experience of bilocation that defines presence in virtual environments, thereby arguing against the myth of “total,” “absolute,” or “complete” immersion.

Keywords: bilocation, first-person shot, subjectivity, death, phenomenology

Evolution or Revolution?

The debate within media studies on the nature, potential, and limits of virtual reality technologies has developed through two fundamental contrasts. The first is the opposition between utopists and apocalyptists. While the former emphasize the possibilities offered by the new medium in every field of human knowledge (or even of non-human knowledge—one need only think of the issue of the application of artificial intelligence to the avatars populating immersive environments), the latter point to the risk of “disconnecting” from everyday physical reality. The second contrast, which concerns us more here, is that between continuists and discontinuists.

Oliver Grau may be counted among the staunchest champions of the thesis that virtual reality is only the last stage—for the moment—in a gradual evolution that began with the frescoes enveloping diners in Pompeiian villas and that unfolded across the centuries through the search for increasingly complex immersive effects. New technological discoveries were constantly put to the service of this pursuit, enabling the creation of the dizzying Baroque ceilings covered in trompe-l’oeil paintings, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dioramas and panoramas, magic lanterns, phantasmagorias, and stereoscopes, to mention only some of the stages in a journey that reached another crucial turning point with cinema. While avoiding the risk of a linear, deterministic teleology, Fabienne Liptay and Burcu Dogramaci, too, have argued that immersion may embrace “any act or experience of plunging into something, without necessarily applying to computer-generated virtual environments.” From a different perspective, Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, and Andreas Mahler came to a similar conclusion by taking playing a board game or reading a book as different, yet equally typical immersive experiences.