The Immersive Enclosure

Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

This book provides a broad view on multisensory landscapes from multiple perspectives. It includes theoretical perspectives as well as case studies. Different theoretical perspectives on landscape emerging from research in the last decades also require a differentiated approach to landscape phenomena, going beyond the visual. For example, a social constructivist approach to the social world foregrounds the processes of negotiating social ‚realities‘. This is not limited to visual aspects, and is not based on a clear physical measurability with an accompanying (purely quantitative) recording. A phenomenological approach, for example, places the synesthetic experience of landscape at the core of interest. This approach to the topic of multisensory via ‚landscape‘ is obvious for several reasons. Firstly, landscape is created (from a constructivist perspective) through the synthesis of sensory impressions on the basis of social patterns of interpretation and evaluation. Secondly, communication about ‚landscape‘ is also accessible to people who do not have any ‚expertlike special knowledge‘ in this regard. Thirdly, landscape as a changing concept is not only a concept of landscape but also of landscape itself. Fourthly, landscape as a changeable concept is particularly suitable for conceptually framing the highly fleeting non-visual stimuli.

In a world that is obsessed with luxury, critical luxury studies is a rapidly emerging field. This is the first book to explore the interplay between the real and imaginary realms of luxury, considering the most significant developments in the theories and practices of luxurious places and spaces over the last fifty years. Providing a critical approach to contemporary interpretations of luxury, the book interrogates the distinction between real places and imaginary spaces. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, it features a range of case studies which take the reader from the Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge to expressions of sensuality in the 1970s domestic interior, and global conceptions of fine wine and art. The Third Realm of Luxury considers the interplay between luxury and space in both the past and the present, examining the abstract conception of excess and exoticism, as well as the real locations of the home, hotel, apartment, and palace. Full of original research, it is a key contribution to the study of consumption, design, fashion, and architecture.

Examines the ways in which Japanese video games engage with social issues and national traumas

Animal Crossing is an innovative virtual world with a global audience beyond traditional online gamers. The book is the first major study, offering an interdisciplinary exploration of copyright and other laws, user creativity and sociability, psychology, the virtual world’s economic and technological basis, uptake during COVID-19, gamification of offline brands, relationships with past/contemporary computer games, and Animal Crossing as an example of the Japanification of online popular culture. The book provides insights for students, researchers and non-specialist readers.

In the past couple of decades, Animal-Visitor Interactions (AVI), a type of Human-Animal Interaction (HAI), have become one of the major topics of interest for researchers working in zoos, especially in relation to animal welfare. This thought-provoking book summarizes the latest research concerning the impacts on HAIs in zoos, including the effects of visitors on animals and the effects of animals, exhibits, and the place itself on visitors. An invaluable resource for ethologists and animal behaviour and welfare students and practitioners, as well as social scientists and indeed anyone working with zoo animals.

Digital Out of Home Entertainment is rather an arcane description for one of the fastest growing technology-sectors. These forms of interactive technology, often established on a 'pay per use' basis are transforming the customer experience in shops, cinemas, museums; almost any environment where consumers are congregating. Kevin Williams and Michael Mascioni's The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier provides a 'state of play' exploration of the successes, the emerging new applications and the strategies that inform them. The authors interviewed nearly 70 leading executives from many familiar organisations in every facet of the digital out-of-home entertainments industry. The result is an essential guide for entertainment executives as well as those involved in retailing, the hotel industry, mobile communications, museums and heritage.