Virtual Reality, Appropriation, and Property Rights in Art: A Roundtable Discussion

Virtual reality is user-interfacing technology that tracks the kinetic movement, changes, and reactions in the body of an operator using devices that provide comprehensive and exclusive sensory excitation (in the sense that perceptual input from outside the system is excluded as much as possible). The technology simultaneously allows information and commands to be input back into the system as effortlessly as possible. Virtual reality can be thought of as total sensory immersion in the input and output of a computer system: everything one sees, feels, and hears comes from the computer, and everything the user does goes back in. It\u27s an interactive illusion. Some of the devices currently being developed include gloves, complete field-of-vision viewers or head-mounted displays, dual-source sound systems that mimic the effect of three-dimensional sound, body suits, magnetic field trackers, prosthetic and robotic devices and holographic projectors