Obsession With Realism

The term transparent immediacy should be considered as two separate words first to truly understand it. Transparency is the idea that the developers of the virtual reality interface are trying to design it in such a way to disappear the medium. ‘Virtual reality is immersive, which means that it is a medium whose purpose of to disappear’. (Bolter 2000, p.21) The reason for this is to make it so instinctive that it erases itself and becomes an ‘”interfaceless” interface’. (Bolter 2000, p.23) This transparent interface blurs the line between reality and the virtual work by making the medium no longer conscious to the user.

The term immediacy refers to the idea of closeness and being intimate like people would be with their families. ‘Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups’. (Bolter 2000, p.30) Users want an instant connection with the medium, for example, when video calling a friend using a software application such as Skype, the user has a feeling of immediate contact, even though the other individual is only on a screen and not actually face to face. ‘The logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naïve or magical conviction that the representation is the same as what is represents’. (Bolter 2000, p.30)

An example of early immediacy would be photography or even painting, where the viewer would be unified with the image through a window or automatic reproduction. (Bolter 2000, p.26) It does this by removing the human (so the photographer or painter) as the agent who makes the viewer realise that the image is not actually transparent.

‘The viewer can see that she is immersed, (…) now inside the depicted space’. (Bolter 2000, p.29)

The user is submerged in the virtual world where they have the point of view of the first person and their field of vision should be continuous and filled without breaks. ‘But today’s technology still contains many ruptures: slow frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system crashes’. (Bolter 2000, p.22) The ‘desire for immediacy is apparent in claims that digital images are more exciting, lively and realistic than mere text on a computer screen’. (Bolter 2000, p.23) In ever more popular films, the idea of how the future will be and the ideas of virtual reality will be increasingly incorporated into society. Even now there has been a greater use of animation and computer generated images in many film such as The Matrix (1999) or S1m0ne (2002), where a producer creates an overnight star who is actually a computer.

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Bibliography

BOLTER, Jay David (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. London, MIT Press.