Beyond the Page: Exploring the Virtual Frontiers of Reading

When virtual reality (VR) technology first captured public attention in the early 1990s, it wasn't due to a breakthrough in computing systems but rather through a burst of enthusiastic rhetoric. The concept of VR emerged fully shaped from its pioneers and was introduced to the public as if it were already perfectly realized. This public image was largely crafted by the bold claims of Jaron Lanier, a charismatic developer who also worked as a musician and visual artist and first coined the term "virtual reality." The narrative was further popularized by Howard Rheingold, an imaginative journalist whose 1991 book, Virtual Reality, offered a glimpse into the clandestine labs where it was claimed that revolutionary digital realms were being developed.

An interview with Jaron Lanier, published in the 1988 edition of the Whole Earth Review and later reprinted in Zhai's Get Real, vividly shaped the public’s perception of the role and potential of virtual reality (VR) technology. Lanier envisioned VR not merely as a temporary escape visited briefly, as with contemporary setups, but as a transformative technology integrated into daily life. He described a future where each home would be equipped with what he called a "Home Reality Engine."

Upon activating this system, individuals would simply wear a minimal VR kit—just glasses and gloves—and instantly, their physical environment would transform. The mundane objects in a home would morph into any desired appearance. In this self-created world, users could adopt any identity, with their virtual avatars mimicking real-world movements and interacting with this new reality through physical gestures.

In describing the virtual reality experience, Lanier highlights its enveloping nature: "When you put on [VR glasses], you suddenly see a world that surrounds you—it's fully three-dimensional and surrounds you, and as you move your head to look around, the images inside the eyeglasses shift in such a way that an illusion is created. While you're moving, the virtual world appears stationary" (Zhai, Get Real, p. 176).

This succinct description captures three critical elements of immersing oneself in a computer-generated world: the feeling of being surrounded, the depth of the environment, and having a dynamic point of view that enhances or extends earlier technologies.

The precursors to the immersive images found in virtual reality are the panorama and the cyclorama, popular nineteenth-century installations. Panoramas consisted of moving pictures that scrolled between two spindles, displaying only a segment of the image at any one time. Cycloramas, on the other hand, were large circular paintings that lined the interior walls of a round building, providing a 360-degree visual experience. Virtual reality melds these concepts by enabling the viewer to physically turn and view different sections of the environment, similar to a cyclorama, while continuously refreshing the visual field like a mechanical panorama.

The sense of depth achieved by virtual reality displays is a continuation of a long line of mathematical and technological advancements. This lineage includes the discovery of perspective during the Renaissance, the stereoscopes used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Cinerama movies of the 1950s that required special glasses to experience depth, and the modern large-screen IMAX movies. Each of these developments has contributed to the way we perceive and engineer depth in visual media.

Here again, VR epitomizes the pinnacle of what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin term "point of view technologies." Initially, visual representations were flat, offering no projection of space beyond their surfaces, thus assigning no specific point of view to the viewer. These were often processed as mere visual icons, or signs, of an absent object rather than as manifestations of its presence within our visual field. Following this, the advent of perspective paintings expanded pictorial space to extend both in front of and behind the canvas, positioning the viewer’s body at a specific vantage point relative to the depicted objects.

Movies introduced dynamic shifts in point of view, with camera movements presenting objects from various angles and altering their apparent size, although the viewer's virtual position within the movie world remained fixed by the camera’s location. Now, with VR, the viewer gains control akin to operating the camera, choosing their viewpoint, and constantly engaging with the environment. This interaction is facilitated by a computer that tracks the user’s head and body movements to adjust the visual experience in real time.

VR is celebrated for its potential to craft more rich and varied environments than any other medium. The closest comparison might be opera, which merges music, dance, drama, poetry, stage design, costumes, and lighting effects. However, even with its diverse artistic elements, opera engages primarily with only two senses—sight and hearing—much like theater, cinema, and TV. In contrast, an advanced VR system eliminates the need for ekphrasis—the verbal description of visual art—as it can integrate all forms of representation, action, and meaning. This makes the VR experience not only multisensory but also omnisemiotic.

The virtual world in VR is dynamically generated by the computer, which tracks the user's head movements and instantaneously creates the visual display corresponding to their current viewpoint. The physical presence of the user is intertwined with the virtual environment through a feedback loop that translates body positions into binary data, which in turn, informs the sensory output of the system. This seamless interaction between the physical and the virtual enhances the depth and immediacy of the VR experience.

The VR experience of space, particularly through architectural walkthroughs, highlights its dynamic and emergent qualities. VR's ability to simulate tours through varied landscapes—from urban settings to imaginary realms—offers a vivid contrast to the static nature of maps. While maps provide a detached, comprehensive view of a territory, VR tours unfold space incrementally, revealing it frame by frame. This not only makes the experience more tangible but also guides users along a directed path, enhancing their sense of movement and perspective changes within the virtual environment, even without full-body immersion.

In VR and computer games, where the system responds to human input, the simulation becomes a version of the user's virtual life story, realized through interactive potential rather than narrated events. Unlike traditional narratives that are retrospectively crafted with a clear plot, VR allows users to live and create their story in real-time, experiencing events without knowing their outcomes. This makes VR not just an un-narrated narrative but a dual realm of possibilities: stories that can be experienced firsthand and those that might be recounted.

Literary authors have long explored concepts of immersion similar to those in VR, even before the technology's existence. Charlotte Brontë imagined immersion as transporting the reader’s body into the narrative world, while Joseph Conrad’s goal of deep sensory involvement mirrors the objectives of VR developers. Opening a book is likened to starting a long journey into this textual world, which, though metaphorically described as an ocean, is essentially a vast narrative landscape.

The relationship between immersion and aesthetics in literature is complex. We often describe a book as immersive when it provides aesthetic pleasure. Yet, immersion can also emerge from the effort of engaging deeply with the text, where the challenge of understanding is part of the appeal. After wrestling with a challenging novel, the joy of starting it anew with a clearer understanding can be profound.

In literary texts, immersion involves not just filling in gaps but actively imagining the scenes, characters, and events, and navigating the text's thematic connections, often moving beyond the straightforward sequence of the narrative. This potentiality embodies the reader’s engagement, making the literary experience both immersive and dynamic.

The concept presented here explores the deep, intrinsic nature of writing and reading texts, which taps into a rich collection of ideas, memories, and language, and immerses the reader in its depths. This process is not just about opening up multiple interpretations or perceptions. According to Pierre Lévy, texts inherently possess a potentiality that defines their very essence—what he calls the "virtual" aspect of texts. Lévy suggests that from its ancient beginnings, text has always been a virtual object: something abstract and not tied to any specific physical form.

Interestingly, even though text is considered virtual and abstract, it originates from the concrete act of thinking. In reading and writing, this involves not only filling in gaps with our own ideas and images but also vividly imagining the scenes, characters, and events described. Moreover, readers often engage with the text in non-linear ways, following various themes that may not align with the straightforward progression of the narrative. This interaction enriches the reading experience, making it a dynamic and engaging process.

These resources are textualized through selection, association, and linearization. But if the text is the product of an actualization, it reverts to a virtual mode of existence as soon as the writing is over. From the point of view of the reader, as reader-response theorists have shown, the text is like a musical score waiting to be performed.

The virtuality of texts and musical scores stems from the complexity of the mediation between what is there, physically, and what is made out of it. Color and form are inherent to pictures and objects, but sound is not inherent to musical scores, nor are thoughts, ideas, and mental representations inherent to the graphic or phonic marks of texts. They must therefore be constructed through an activity far more transformative than interpreting sensory data. In the case of texts, the process of actualization involves not only the process of filling in the blanks but also simulating in imagination the depicted scenes, characters, and events, and spatializing the text by following the threads of various thematic webs, often against the directionality of the linear sequence.

Consider how computers work: Initially, they exist only as concepts and designs, which are then used to build actual machines. These machines are considered "virtual" because they can run various software programs, allowing them to emulate different devices and enhance their capabilities.

 Computers can use simulation programs to test theoretical models of objects or processes, helping to predict different outcomes from specific situations. This testing helps users understand and influence potential real-world scenarios. Since computers can mimic other systems and integrate various virtual operations, they can be seen as multiple levels of virtual—they are machines built from ideas that run virtual simulations to manage or improve reality.

Texts, therefore, can generate a variety of worlds, interpretations, uses, and experiences, positioning them as virtual objects long before the advent of modern technology.

 However, electronic technology has significantly broadened this perspective. With the rise of digital reading devices, the approach to interacting with texts has shifted. Instead of merely considering what one should do with texts in a traditional sense—such as understanding or interpreting them—the focus now extends to exploring a wider array of possibilities. Electronic reading devices encourage a more explorative and utilitarian approach, prompting users to ask, "What can I do with these texts?" It underscores the expanded functionality and interactive potential that digital platforms bring to traditional text engagement.