The Tourist Gaze: Towards Contextualised Virtual Environments

Abstract

Introduction “To be at all - to exist in any way - is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over them and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them....” Casey, 1997:ix This chapter argues that our bodily experience of place may provide a key to achieving a contextualised sense of presence in virtual environments. We begin by briefly reviewing current practice in evaluating virtual environments. The evaluating of these environments hinges on measuring our sense of being there. This is treated as our sense of presence but as we will show this is a curious decontextualised sense of being there. From there we turn to the question of contextualised presence – what it is and why it is becoming important for current and emerging virtual reality (VR) applications. We draw upon the philosophical, empirical and phenomenological treatments of body, place and the conjunction of the two to inform this discussion. We conclude by proposing a new paradigm for designing and evaluating contextualised virtual environments, based on the metaphor of tourism and the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002)