The book that susses out the future
The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan by MIT professor Paul Roquet is an intriguing analysis of virtual reality as a new vessel for a contaminated kind of individualism, the product of people retreating deeper into personal devices instead of the larger, collective world. Released earlier this year—a year when people are increasingly perturbed by Mark Zuckerberg’s dystopian-feeling vision for virtual reality—the book encourages a more global approach to dissecting VR.
Roquet explores VR’s most popular applications in Japan. What does it mean for people to insert themselves fully in a virtual world? What does it mean for an older cis man to transform himself into a teen girl? Roquet chomps through these questions to holistically evaluate this new tech and its future.
