Fantasies of Virtual Reality: Untangling Fiction, Fact, and Threat (Strong Ideas)

The fantasies that underpin common perceptions of Virtual Reality—and what we need to know about VR’s potential risks as well as its opportunities.

Virtual reality is the next new frontier for Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, who has overseen Meta’s investment of billions into VR, pitches it as the next dominant computing paradigm. More than just a gaming technology, VR is top of mind for academics, tech reportage, and industry evangelists who all see the potential for VR to revolutionize fields such as education and health, as well as the way we work and communicate. But will VR achieve all this? In Fantasies of Virtual Reality, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston strip bare the tech industry’s vision of a future dominated by immersive VR experiences, challenging the utopian promises of this technology’s potential.

Carter and Egliston offer a critical account of VR in a variety of contexts, from gaming to human resources to policing and the military. They argue that while VR does hold significant potential, the overhyped expectations surrounding it, from achieving true empathetic understanding to transforming traditional education and office work, are often overstated and fraught with issues of privacy, control, and exclusion. What’s more, there is nothing truly virtual about virtual reality: VR is deeply entrenched in the material world, driven by tangible technological, economic, and social logics.

An accessible introduction to this emerging technology, Fantasies of Virtual Reality is essential reading for anyone interested in what VR can really do—and what is just plain fantasy.

Marcus Carter is Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He is the author of Treacherous Play and the coauthor of Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons[KAC1] (both MIT Press).

Ben Egliston is Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow.