Abstract
A central debate in the philosophy of virtual reality (VR) focuses on the reality of virtual items. Broadly, there are two main disagreements. Some views accept a metaphysical orientation to VR, and disagree on the reality of virtual items. For instance, David Chalmers (Disputatio 9(46):309-352, 2017, Disputatio 11(55):453-486, 2019, 2022) defends digitalism, the view that virtual items are real digital items. Neil McDonnell & Nathan Wildman (Disputatio 11(55):371-397, 2019), by contrast, defend fictionalism, which maintains that virtual items are unreal fictions. Other views, like Grant Tavinor’s (2021), reject the metaphysical orientation, arguing that focusing on the reality of virtual items is a mistake. In what follows I evaluate these two disagreements. I argue that experiences of virtual items depend on episodes of picture perception. Recognizing this reveals that the current debates are either easily resolved in favor of one view, or are not disagreeing about the reality of virtual items, but about what virtual items are.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of data and materials
Not applicable.
Notes
Here I use virtual items as an umbrella term that includes virtual worlds, environments, objects, subjects, properties, events, and actions.
In what follows I focus on virtual items as they occur in VR specifically. This is primarily to simplify the exposition. I take it that the points I make equally apply for virtual items we access through more traditional displays like TVs or computer monitors.
See Tavinor (2021) chapter 7 in particular.
I focus on paradigmatic virtual items because ultimately I think that it is not clear what items count as virtual, given the issues the paper raises.
Like the interaction, the immersion is minimal. One is limited to exploring the virtual world with rotational but not positional movement (i.e. pitch, roll, and yaw only). Still, as far as immersion goes, the Cardboard is more immersive than e.g. 3D cinema, and other traditional display technologies. That it offers attenuated immersion and interaction are not clearly obstacles, since both interactivity and immersion come in degrees.
For instance, to generate anamorphic images, anaglyphs, or to convey some meaning, like in Holbein’s The Ambassadors.
For instance consider a VR experience that portrays the experience of a blind person, and so represents virtual objects with sounds only. For an example, see ARTE France’s (2019) VR application, Notes on Blindness.
One reason for this is that there may also be non-visual pictures. See e.g. Kulvicki (2009) Chapter 5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting this point.
One way this could be so is if one adopts Tavinor’s view (see Sect. 3), because a picture and e.g. a sound may both be of the same thing.
VR technology now often includes motion-tracking controllers. But these first appeared without HMDs e.g. the Playstation Moves and Nintendo Wii controllers, and early HMDs did not include motion controllers e.g. Oculus Rift CV1.
This is not to say that any pictures are sufficient for VR. The virtual aesthetics literature (e.g. Grau (2002) and Tavinor (2021) presents various conditions that VR pictures must meet, and views like Chalmers’ (2017, 2019, 2022) and Brey’s (2014) require that (full-blown) VR be interactive. But these conditions are consistent with maintaining that virtual items are experienced at least partly by seeing pictures.
See e.g. Nanay (2018).
Nanay (2022), for instance, considers both views.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this latter possibility.
Assuming the virtual item is multimodal.
What this view amounts to turns on the status of pictorial items. For views that maintain that pictorial items are nothing over and above the picture surface, this view is not substantially different from the first. For views that construe pictorial items in a more ontologically robust way, virtual items are something other than (some parts of) the picture surface.
In addition to these options, virtual items me be partly identical to or constituted by more than one component. For instance, a virtual item could be partly the surface of the VR device’s picture, and partly what the picture is of. Here I omit these options for simplicity, since nothing in the argument turns on the number of available options.
See chapter 7 in particular.
Tavinor writes “This ontological orientation is a trap, and most philosophers now working on VR are thus willfully ensnared in a way that has been to the detriment of our understanding of actual VR.[…] I believe that the orientation has simply led to a great deal of confusion about the topic” p.135.
Tavinor writes “VR is a technologically fancy kind of picturing.” p.12.
See Tavinor (2021) chapter 6.
In particular, I think pictorial items raise difficult questions about their nature.
The argument here comes from Chalmers (2017), but see p.210–211 for a version in Reality + .
But this is not to say we perceptually attend to them. There’s a difference between perceiving, and perceptually attending.
A potential proponent of this view is Brey (2014), who maintains that “A virtual object is a digital object that is represented graphically as an object or region in a two- or three dimensional space and that can be interacted with or used through a computer interface.” (p.44).
The idea of photographic transparency comes from Walton (1984) and is not unanimously accepted. Nor do I endorse it here.
A helpful image comes from Stevenson’s (1964) movie, Mary Poppins. On their adventures, Mary, Bert, and the children jump into a picture Bert has drawn, and are transported to a cartoon world beyond the picture.
Cf. Putnam’s (1981) brains in vats argument, which also highlights a worry about what representations are of.
Indeed this is the case in The Matrix’s narrative. The machines create more than one matrix, and some are imagined, while others represent the twentieth century realistically.
References
Ali, R. (2023). The Values of the Virtual. Journal of Applied Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12625
ARTE France. (2019). Notes on blindness. Retrieved February 4, 2024 from https://www.arte.tv/digitalproductions/fr/notes-on-blindness/
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (S. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Brey, P. (2014). The Physical and Social Reality of Virtual Worlds. In M. Grimshaw (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality (pp. 42–54). Oxford University Press.
Briscoe, R. (2016). Depiction, Pictorial Experience, and Vision Science. Philosophical Topics, 44(2), 43–81.
Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The Virtual and the Real. Disputatio, 9(46), 309–352.
Chalmers, D. J. (2019). The Virtual as the Digital. Disputatio, 11(55), 453–486.
Chalmers, D. J. (2022). Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. W. W. Norton.
Cipresso, P., Giglioli, I. A. C., Raya, M. A., & Riva, G. (2018). The past, present, and future of virtual and augmented reality research: A network and cluster analysis of the literature. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2086. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02086
Grau, O. (2002). Virtual art: From illusion to immersion. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7104.001.0001
Grau, O. (2003). Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. MIT Press.
Juul, J. (2019). Virtual Reality: Fictional all the Way Down (and that’s OK). Disputatio, 11(55), 333–343. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0010
Koch, S. (2022). Chalmers on Virtual Reality: Realism on the Cheap? Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anac068
Kulvicki, J. V. (2009). On Images: Their Structure and Content. Oxford University Press.
Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and form: A theory of art. Scribner.
Lopes, D. (2005). Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures. Oxford University Press.
Ludlow, P. (2019). The social furniture of virtual worlds. Disputatio, 11(55), 345–369. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0009
McDonnell, N., & Wildman, N. (2019). Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional? Disputatio, 11(55), 371–397.
Nanay, B. (2018). Threefoldness. Philosophical Studies, 175(1), 163–182.
Nanay, B. (2022). What do we see in pictures? The sensory individuals of picture perception. Philosophical Studies, 179(12), 3729–3746.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press.
Rauschnabel, P. A., Felix, R., Hinsch, C., Shahab, H., & Alt, F. (2022). What is XR? Towards a framework for augmented and virtual reality. Computers in Human Behavior, 133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107289
Stevenson, R. (Director). (1964). Mary Poppins. Buena Vista Distribution Company.
Tavinor, G. (2021). The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality. Routledge.
Walton, K. L. (1984). Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism. Noûs, 18(1), 67–72.
Walton, K. (1990). Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1987). Painting as an Art. Princeton University Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Phoebe Hoi Yee Chan and an anonymous reviewer at the Asian Journal of Philosophy for their helpful feedback on this paper. I would also like to thank Patrick Lewtas for comments on a previous draft, as well as Cody Turner and David Chalmers for discussions on the topic.
Funding
This paper has received no funding.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
I am the sole author of this paper.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical approval
Not applicable.
Informed consent
Not applicable.
Statement regarding research involving human participants and/or animals
Not applicable.
Competing interests
No competing interests to declare.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Ali, R. What are virtual items, and are they real?. AJPH 3, 9 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-024-00144-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-024-00144-z