Virtual reality art at the turn of the millenium saw an explosion of creative exploration around this nascent technoloy. Though VR art has much in common with media art in general, the affordances of the technology gave rise to unique experiences, discourses, and artistic investigations. Women artists were at the forefront of the medium, shaping its aesthetic and technical development, and VR fostered a range of artistic concerns and experimentation that was largely distinct from closely related forms such as digital games. Today, a new wave of consumer technologies including 3D TV’s, gestural and motion tracking interfaces, and headmount displays as viable, low-cost gaming peripherals drives a resurgence in interest in VR for interactive art and entertainment. Designers, game developers, and artists working with these technologies are in many cases discovering them anew. This paper explores ways of reconnecting this current moment in VR with its past. Can the artistic investigations begun in previous waves of VR be continued? How do the similarities and differences in contexts, communities, technologies, and discourses affect the development of the medium?

Date Published: 28 February 2014
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9012, The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2014, 901206 (28 February 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2042614

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9012:
The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2014
Margaret Dolinsky; Ian E. McDowall, Editor(s)