Extreme VR: strategies of sensorial immersion and the intensities of experience

Abstract

ABSTRACT A range of VR products offer a variety of “extreme” experiences, providing their users with access to numerous unforgiving environments and confronting situations. This paper explores how they intensify and extend the medium’s capacity for interfering in and imposing upon individual and collective perception and sensation. It locates “extreme VR” within a genealogy of the medium’s own preoccupation with sensorial intensities, exploring its potential to advance certain forms of control over audiences. Suggesting the designs of “extreme VR” as forms of training in intense synthetic stimulus, it considers how they might inform wider strategies for ordering and standardizing experiences and sensibilities at scale. Not only do these extreme forms of VR register a growing techno-industrial power to immerse, incorporate and influence, they also offer the means to habituate particular regimes of socio-sensorial experience.