Extreme VR: strategies of sensorial immersion and the intensities of experience

ABSTRACT

A range of VR products offer a variety of “extreme” experiences, providing their users with access to numerous unforgiving environments and confronting situations. This paper explores how they intensify and extend the medium’s capacity for interfering in and imposing upon individual and collective perception and sensation. It locates “extreme VR” within a genealogy of the medium’s own preoccupation with sensorial intensities, exploring its potential to advance certain forms of control over audiences. Suggesting the designs of “extreme VR” as forms of training in intense synthetic stimulus, it considers how they might inform wider strategies for ordering and standardizing experiences and sensibilities at scale. Not only do these extreme forms of VR register a growing techno-industrial power to immerse, incorporate and influence, they also offer the means to habituate particular regimes of socio-sensorial experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• extreme VR experiences
• media technologies
• multisensorial
• immersion
• affect
• regimes of experience

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors and reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for improving the manuscript, much appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Crouch

David Crouch is based in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. His research engages with issues surrounding the material and social effects of media technologies, innovations in VR, robotics, and the digital transformation of human experience. He is the author of Colonial Psychosocial (2014) and his work has been published in the Space and Culture, Mobilities, International Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of Australian Studies.

Katarina Damjanov

Katarina Damjanov is senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests revolve around considerations of the changing relationships between humans, technologies and environments. Her work features in journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Science, Technology & Human Values and Fibreculture.