(as opposed to the HMD paradigm synonymous, for him, with the term "virtual reality"). Indeed, as I shall argue in Chapter 1, Krueger stands as a kind of father figure for the entire mixed reality paradigm.
It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that Krueger has recently described this terminological difference in terms highly reminiscent of the latter's challenge to earlier conceptions of virtual reality: "Whereas the HMD folks thought that 3D scenery was the essence of reality, I felt that the degree of physical involvement was the measure of immersion."iii,4 On Krueger's account, one of the crucial components of physical involvement was lack of bodily encumbrance and, in a testament to the prescience of his thinking, the mixed reality environments now ubiquitous in our world do require a nonencumbered interface.iv The theoretical underpinnings of Krueger's alternate vision of “artificial reality" have found their practical fruition in today's mixed reality environments, and the “first generation" model of VR as a disembodied hyperspace free of all material constraints simply no longer has any purchase in our world.
Following from this defining principle of mixed reality are several important corollaries that serve to differentiate it from earlier conceptions of virtual reality and predecessor technologies. First, the mixed reality paradigm radically reconfigures a trait that has characterized virtual reality from its proto-origin as the representationalist fantasy par excellence: namely, a desire for complete convergence with natural perception. This trait serves to distinguish it from all discrete image media, including cinema, which, as underscored by Gilles Deleuze's correction of Bergson's criticism of the “cinematic illusion," function by breaking with natural perception.
Such a break (at least on Deleuze's reading) grants cinema the capacity to present the world from a nonhuman perspective and thus opens a properly autonomous machinism; by contrast, the functional homology linking virtual reality technologies with natural perception supports a prosthetics that functions to expand the scope of natural perception, to tap the technics at its core. In its fantasy form, though certainly not in reality, virtual reality works—or rather would work—like an externalization of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's analogy for consciousness: if consciousness can be likened to a “movie-in-the-brain" with no external spectator, then virtual reality would comprise something like a movieoutside-the-brain, again, importantly, with no external spectator.⁵
BODIES IN CODE
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