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The worldview espoused in Apocalyptic AI pop science plays a role in massively multiplayer online games, as shown by the presence of transhumanist religious groups (such as the Order of Cosmic Engineers) in Second Life but also by the interest shown by that world’s inhabitants who frequently desire a permanent shift to life online even when they are not explicitly transhumanists. Virtual reality has become sacred space for many online gamers, who acquire powerful communities, meaning and purpose through their online activities. Such religiosity inclines many toward transhumanist goals of transcending the human condition, especially through the possibility of uploading consciousness into virtual reality.

Since speakers refer to and quantify over virtual objects as naturally as they do over actual objects, natural ontology is basically intensional, requiring acceptance of virtual realities. Each language has socially shared cognitive reality. Current Russellian‐Quinean extensional ontology is criticized in favour of a more Meinongian approach, based on the Kantian epistemological dilemma.

Following a discussion of the online world, ‘Second Life’, the introduction provides a preliminary survey of the virtual realities of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries; an overview of the historical circumstances that conditioned their production, proliferation and reception; and an account of recent attempts to historicize virtual reality. It distinguishes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses of virtual reality from those of earlier periods, while also sketching some of the ways in which they anticipate those of contemporary culture. The introduction concludes by proposing that contemporary discourses of virtual reality draw on the conflicting rhetorics of Enlightenment and Romanticism. They conclude a tradition of representation inspired by the former, break with this tradition, but by this means return to the latter. The mechanical age concludes with an apparently oxymoronic return to its beginning.

A decade of study and research using digital virtual reality technology has led to several propositions that bear on the interplay among consciousness, free will, and virtual reality. Conscious and unconscious transportation, media and communication, and escaping the current situation are discussed in relation to consciousness and virtual reality research.

This chapter evaluates current possibilities for the attainment of a realistic context over the web by attempting to match the basic requirements of art history scholarship and teaching against what is currently offered and what can be expected in the future. It surveys some ongoing research in the field from the perspective of an observer and a user. The first section of the chapter discusses virtual reality modelling language (VRML) and describes a project of the Supercomputer Group at the Australian National University. This project aimed to model, using VRML, the Buddhist stupa at Borobudur. The chapter also discusses a second project which deals with the Piazza de Popolo at Rome and the reasons why this project did not employ VMRL. The second section of the chapter examines some other ways in which an ordinary lecturer may use various simple technologies to conjure context, and with more flexibility, detail and accuracy that VRML can ever achieve.

The chapter seeks to define virtual reality. It looks into seven elements that constitute the term. Simulation refers to the modern computer graphics and sound effects that can create such a high degree of realism. Interaction refers to electronic representations that people perceive as virtual reality by their interacts with with them. Artificiality refers to a world that is largely of human construct. Immersion refers to the computer-generated sensations to which a man can immerse his sensory perceptions to simulate reality. Telepresence refers to the capacity of computer technology to replace human presence by robotic presence. Full-body immersion refers to the latest technology that allows human body to interact with graphics on a computer screen. Networked communications refers to communication that can go beyond verbal or body language to take on magical, alchemical properties. A virtual-world maker might conjure up hitherto unheard-of mixtures of sight, sound, and motion.

The chapter examines the metaphysics of virtual reality. Metaphysics which has been discredited by various philosophers may suddenly find a revival with the introduction of virtual-reality by the computer generation. The chapter begins with a description of a human's ability to immerse himself or herself into symbolic space. Focusing on Kant, the chapter describes the gradual move of philosophy from the concept of a unique and fixed world into the concept of diversity and plurality. The chapter proceeds to discuss the danger posed by virtual reality where virtual worlds are indistinguishable from real worlds, virtual reality becomes bland and mundane, and users undergo predominantly passive experiences akin to drug induced hallucinations. The concepts of mortality, natality, and fragility provide helpful anchors to reality to counter the simulated one presented by virtual reality.

Present trends in the analytical characterization of cultural heritage materials are briefly reviewed, including the use of microbeams, portable instrumentation, non-invasive investigations, and standardization of the results. Some of the persisting problems and pitfalls are discussed in the general frame of cultural heritage investigations. Digital databases and virtual reality are a growing area that ought to make life easier for cultural heritage management and research, provided that academic curricula keep up with the pace of current developments.

This chapter discusses the emergence of virtual reality (VR) technologies which have advanced the understanding of ancient structures. In 1998, through the funding of the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, a project on determining the structure of Rome's theatre Theatrum Lapideum was started. This Pompey Project benefited as well as contributed to a wider programme of digital research through the application of virtual reality. The VR-enhanced research project contributed to the understanding of the parts of the structure and the aspects of the post-antique history of the Roman theatre. Through VR technology, a graphic reconstruction of the site, 3and D computer models, the digital modelling of the structure and its artefacts were attained. In addition to developing research processes, virtual reality technology has revolutionized the ways in which knowledge is produced. It enables the formation of new knowledge and information by making the knowledge visible.

The chapter discusses a fascination with how computers smoothly integrate with human thought processes. Computer software can mirror the mind so closely that together human and computer constitute a third kind of entity, a marriage of person and machine, an augmented human intelligence. The book has discussed the development in computer and virtual technology concepts together with the underlying philosophies that accompany such developments. Then an observation came about as to the divide between the interests in the United States on the application of virtual reality technology. The West Coast wants an ecstatic, otherworldly, and countercultural application, for example a form of virtual sex. The East Coast wants an industrial and military application of the technology, for example flight simulations for the Air Force. The discussion moved into the plot of the film Lawnmower Man, and concluded with the need for philosophy to define the emerging relationship between man and virtual reality.

This chapter provides a definition of the subject matter of this book: virtual environments technology. It discusses why multi-user virtual environments, in particular, have become important and sketches the history of this technology. Next, it gives an overview of how this book analyzes the various aspects of how users interact in these environments. Finally, it previews an argument that guides the book; namely that different types of technology afford different types of interaction. Only two types of technology are possible in the future which are already well advanced: computer-generated environments and video-captured environments, both of which provide the means for “being there together” at-a-distance in a shared space, but with quite different possibilities and constraints for how people interact with each other and with these spaces.

This chapter identifies the book’s major themes, arguments, problems and possibilities, including reference to the major, pertinent philosophical notions of games and sport, integrating the seminal work of Bernard Suits and Brian Sutton-Smith. It outlines how a certain characterisation of the physical world arises within digital space, often through the design interface that mediates our experiences. Furthermore, it considers whether the design of perfect simulations in sports would make redundant off-line sport spaces. The chapter also discusses how examples of life online require us to reconsider what we acknowledge as real or meaningful in human experience and how this evaluation is contextualized within a set of ideological assumptions about the nature of virtual realities. It introduces the idea of second-wave convergence to explain how socio-technical changes within such practices as sports give rise to new evaluations of life online. Furthermore, it discusses how our nostalgia for analog lives is particularly apparent within practices like sports, which are constituted by a presumed notion of what embodied action and corporeality should entail. In pursuing this argument, it also considers how one defines embodiment and how wearable technology is challenging the view that digital identities are separable from our analog lives.

This chapter discusses a variety of conceptual and methodological issues regarding the assessment of rational and irrational beliefs. It reviews two major ways of identifying and assessing irrational and rational beliefs: (1) psychological instruments and (2) therapy oriented assessment, and discusses state of the science developments in assessment including approaches based on virtual reality.

Neo-Lockeans rely heavily on our intuitive responses to imaginary cases. Is it plausible to suppose these responses can be a guide to metaphysical truth? This chapter argues that thought experiments have a legitimate but limited role to play in our investigations into our own nature. After a brief outline of the orthodox psychological continuity approach, a series of imaginary scenarios are developed, involving different grades of virtual reality. These aim to establish firstly that the psychological approach lacks the intuitive appeal often claimed for it, and secondly that an account grounded in experiential continuity would have considerably greater credibility — provided that it could be developed in a satisfactory manner. When the orthodox Lockean methodology is taken as far as it can go, it ends up at pointing in different direction than is usually supposed.

The chapter begins with a discussion of Philippe De Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon and of the parallel drawn in its famous concluding scene (added in 1782) between Satan and Loutherbourg, the creation of Pandemonium and the virtual spaces conjured by the Eidophusikon. In the second part of the chapter, Satan and Pandemonium provide points of reference in relation to which an alphabet is constructed of relations between the virtual and the actual in the late eighteenth century. Following discussions of works by Barry, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, Blake, and John Martin, amongst others, the argument concludes by noting that during this period Satan is also the vehicle for introducing a new sense of the virtual, one in which this term refers to a realm of living-potential from which all virtual realities emerge (‘virtuality’, in contemporary parlance). In this regard, romantic virtuality anticipates the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

The chapter introduces the concepts of scientific analysis in a non-technical approach, limiting the use of mathematical formulae and specialist’s jargon. Emphasis is given to the fundamentals of the technique and the information provided, in order to make the students and users from different fields aware of the potential of modern scientific investigations. The chapter broadly addresses the concepts involved in the different areas of experimental characterization, focusing on analytical strategies and instrumental capabilities, and inserting the different techniques into a time–space–cost frame. Parameters to take into account when planning scientific analyses of cultural heritage materials are discussed, including sampling, invasivity, and detection limits. The cultural heritage materials evolving along specific time-paths are discussed with specific reference to degradation and dating. Each technique or group of techniques is described in technical insets, emphasizing practical issues. The main areas of application and appropriate case studies are briefly reviewed and referenced.

Matthew Goodwin, in “Virtual Reality at the Border of Migration, Race and Labor,” displays how Latin American writers and artists have shown that virtual reality reproduces colonialism’s dystopian construction of race and exploitation of labor, that it does not generate a utopia but just another world to be colonized. Goodwin examines works by Guillermo Lavín, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Alex Rivera that use representations of virtual reality to illuminate various forms of exploitative labor.