This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography. When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the "real" world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve. The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.

Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture: Designing in Mixed Realities presents a curated selection of projects and texts contributed by leading international architects and designers who are using virtual reality technologies in their design process. It triggers discussion and debate on exploring the aesthetic potential and establishing its language as an expressive medium in architectural design. Although virtual reality is not new and the technology has evolved rapidly, the aesthetic potential of the medium is still emerging and there is a great deal more to explore. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the current use of virtual reality technologies in the architectural design process. Contributions are presented in six parts, fully illustrated with over 150 images. Recent projects presented are distributed in five themes: introduction to mixed realities; space and form; context and ambiguity; materiality and movement; body and social. Each theme includes richly illustrated essays by leading academics and practitioners, including those from Zaha Hadid Architects and MVRDV, detailing their design process using data-driven methodologies. Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture expands the use of technology per se and focuses on how architecture can benefit from its aesthetic potential during the design process. A must-read for practitioners, academics, and students interested in cutting-edge digital design.

Arguing that the virtual body is something new—namely, an entity that from an ontological perspective has only recently entered the world—Roberto Diodato considers the implications of this kind of body for aesthetics. Virtual bodies insert themselves into the space opened up by the famous distinction in Aristotle's Physics between natural and artificial beings—they are both. They are beings that are simultaneously events; they are images that are at once internal and external; they are ontological hybrids that exist only in the interaction between logical-computational text and human bodies endowed with technological prostheses. Pursuing this line of thought, Diodato reconfigures classic aesthetic concepts such as mimesis, representation, the relation between illusion and reality, the nature of images and imagination, and the theory of sensory knowledge.

Written by a team of world-renowned artists, researchers and practitioners - all pioneers in using augmented reality based creative works and installations as a new form of art - this is the first book to explore the exciting new field of augmented reality art and its enabling technologies. As well as investigating augmented reality as a novel artistic medium the book covers cultural, social, spatial and cognitive facets of augmented reality art. Intended as a starting point for exploring this new fascinating area of research and creative practice it will be essential reading not only for artists, researchers and technology developers, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in emerging augmented reality technology and its current and future applications in art.

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject.

This book offers new ways of thinking about and assessing the impact of virtual reality on its users. It argues that we must go beyond traditional psychological concepts of VR "presence" to better understand the many varieties of virtual experiences. The author provides compelling evidence that VR simulations are capable of producing "virtually real" experiences in people. He also provides a framework for understanding when and how simulations induce virtually real experiences. From these insights, the book shows that virtually real experiences are responsible for several unaddressed ethical issues in VR research and design. Experimental philosophers, moral psychologists, and institutional review boards must become sensitive to the ethical issues involved between designing "realistic" virtual dilemmas, for good data collection, and avoiding virtually real trauma. Ethicists and game designers must do more to ensure that their simulations don’t inculcate harmful character traits. Virtually real experiences, the author claims, can make virtual relationships meaningful, productive, and conducive to welfare but they can also be used to systematically mislead and manipulate users about the nature of their experiences. The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality will appeal to philosophers working in applied ethics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics, as well as researchers and students interested in game studies and game design.

This dissertation maps out the epistemological and political coordinates of contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) aesthetics through a hybrid inquiry that combines conventional academic research practices with artistic experiments. Since its inception, both conceptually and technologically, VR has emerged as a model for a techno-utopic paradigm that seeks to construct an autonomous image not only from the mediation of artist, but also from the material, spatial, and by extension social and political determinations of reality. With the differences in the formal techniques and strategies of each instance of the media constellation that this teleological paradigm conglomerates such as cinema, early proto-cinematic devices, stereoscopic 3D, and cybernetics, the objective is always the same: to develop an immediate and autonomous interface shorn of limitations configured according to the subjective and bodily conditions of the viewer. In both practice and theory this dissertation attempts to problematize the question of autonomy and by extension heteronomy, which have been distributed in a binary opposition in 20th century artistic practices. I contend that aesthetic practices emerge within the dynamic and interlocked relation between heteronomy and autonomy. Neither artistic practices nor image technologies are autonomous from the political and historical context in which they became possible both technologically and conceptually. Moreover, I argue that artistic practices become critical insofar that the question of autonomy appears sensibly as a problem. Through a threefold inquiry on the question of autonomy and heteronomy, this dissertation has aimed to problematize the very context that made it possible. First, I problematized the autonomy of art purported to be the grounding gesture of the critical nature of research-creation; second, the autonomy purported to be inherent to VR as an immersive and interactive image technology was called into question; and third, as the extension of the second, I problematized the autonomy of the viewer and virtual images in the VR experience that constitutes the artistic experiment component of the dissertation.