The website for Facebook Reality Labs promises that augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will soon “become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal computers are today.” Facebook is investing billions of dollars to fulfill this prophecy. It acquired the VR headset company Oculus in 2014, and in 2019 it bought CTRL-Lab, a startup developing a neural interface that allows users to control a computer with their thoughts. As part of the push to “build the future of connection with AR and VR,” Facebook is trying to connect brains to computers, so that people can communicate with each other as directly as possible, sharing an experience itself rather than a photo or video. The “magic of presence,” as Facebook calls it, is feeling that you’re inside a represented world because the feedback loop between your body and that world is so short that any mediation seems to disappear.
Given Facebook’s mission “to bring the world closer together,” it makes sense that the company would describe AR and VR as technologies for social connection and experience sharing. Meanwhile, other corporations and cultural institutions are imagining futures in which the immersive potentials of these mediums transform the activities central to their own missions. Google Glass and Google Earth, for example, express Google’s approach to AR and VR, respectively, as a drive to make the physical world “searchable” through embodied interaction. Museums and art foundations are investing in AR and VR as the “next level” in the relationship between art and technology, as new mediums that promise, as photography once did, a more direct experience of the world through art.
I want to look to the past instead of the future, to reject the notion that AR and VR are technologies moving toward some particular transformative change. The basic elements of these mediums existed long before computing, and do not necessarily improve through technological progress. In their expensive pursuits, companies like Facebook misrepresent the “magic of presence” as a technological achievement, when it is actually an aesthetic one that emerged as part of modern mass visual culture. While the interactivity of AR and VR is facilitated by computing, the small displays used for 3D headsets are like any other screens. Their imagery follows lens-based representational conventions that were codified in photography and cinema long before the advent of digital computation, and their methods for producing the effect of presence are rooted in nineteenth-century experiments with immersive spectatorship.