Guest Editors’ Introduction: Virtual reality: immersion and empathy

Abstract

Many of us are ‘over’ virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation. To sustain itself, the enthusiasm that it sparks about what could be over the next technological horizon sometimes rebounds, instead, toward the past to rediscover historical precursors. Witness, for example, the unlikely resuscitation of the Viewmaster in 2015, using a smartphone as a very expensive, moving-image stereoscope.1 As popular interest waxes and wanes, VR seems to have always been around and to be always emerging, but never to have completely arrived.