The website for
Facebook Reality Labs promises that augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality
(VR) will soon “become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal
computers are today.” Facebook is investing billions of dollars to
fulfill this prophecy. It acquired the VR headset company Oculus in 2014, and
in 2019 it bought CTRL-Lab, a startup developing a neural interface that allows
users to control a computer with their thoughts. As part of the push to “build
the future of connection with AR and VR,” Facebook is trying to connect brains
to computers, so that people can communicate with each other as directly as
possible, sharing an experience itself rather than a photo or video. The “magic
of presence,” as Facebook calls it, is feeling that you’re inside a represented
world because the feedback loop between your body and that world is so short
that any mediation seems to disappear.
Given Facebook’s mission “to bring the world closer
together,” it makes sense that the company would describe AR and VR as technologies
for social connection and experience sharing. Meanwhile, other corporations and
cultural institutions are imagining futures in which the immersive potentials
of these mediums transform the activities central to their own missions. Google
Glass and Google Earth, for example, express Google’s approach to AR and VR,
respectively, as a drive to make the physical world “searchable” through
embodied interaction. Museums and art foundations are investing in AR and VR as
the “next level” in the relationship between art and technology, as new mediums
that promise, as photography once did, a more direct experience of the world
through art.
I want to look to the past instead of the future, to reject
the notion that AR and VR are technologies moving toward some particular
transformative change. The basic elements of these mediums existed long before
computing, and do not necessarily improve through technological progress. In
their expensive pursuits, companies like Facebook misrepresent the “magic of
presence” as a technological achievement, when it is actually an aesthetic one
that emerged as part of modern mass visual culture. While the interactivity of
AR and VR is facilitated by computing, the small displays used for 3D headsets
are like any other screens. Their imagery follows lens-based representational
conventions that were codified in photography and cinema long before the advent
of digital computation, and their methods for producing the effect of presence
are rooted in nineteenth-century experiments with immersive spectatorship.
To some extent, the “magic of presence” was already
available in the camera obscura, a means of projecting images that has existed
for more than two thousand years. When a camera obscura is a room a person can
stand in—as the Latin meaning of “camera” suggests—a circular aperture in a
wall brings the outside inside, casting a moving color image of the exterior on
the opposite wall. This effect is as startling today as it was centuries ago,
even more so, given how a spectator’s body, if positioned within the cone of
projection between the aperture and the far wall, becomes an additional surface
for the image. Any sense of being within a pictured scene is undermined,
however, by the reversal of the image. The world pictured on the wall appears
with its sky toward the floor and its ground toward the ceiling. As camera
obscuras shrank from rooms to boxlike devices—precursors of the photographic
camera—lenses and mirrors were used to correct that reversal. But this gain in
verisimilitude diminished the potential for immersion, because it produced a
discrete picture rather than an encompassing scene.
The magic lantern, invented in the 1600s, adapted the
box-style camera obscura for a more versatile projection technique that would
later form the basis for film projectors. By positioning a glass slide between
a lens and a light source, magic lanterns could project images at scales large
enough for public shows. For the phantasmagorias that became popular in Europe
in the 1790s, a skilled magic lantern operator, or several, projected images
around a darkened space. The ingenious use of cranks, sliding plates, and dual
lenses produced effects of movement, suggesting floating ghouls and dancing
skeletons. This ghostly subject matter suited the limitations of this format.
It proved difficult to construct more complex or realistic immersive spectacles
with lantern slides. Phantasmagorias found enthusiastic audiences, especially
in the United States, into the 1800s, though their popularity was eclipsed in
that century by the painted panorama. These were erected in European cities as
walk-in architecture: large, linked canvases surrounding a central viewing
platform. The panorama was organized around the audience’s perspective, its
continuous surface mapped to the gaze of a spectator who physically turned and
moved to take it all in.
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century
did not displace the panorama so much as absorb and support its existing logic.
Photographs began to be arranged in series meant to express spatial and
temporal continuity, to meet the expectation for expanded views cultivated by
panoramas. Special cameras were invented to capture panoramic photographs,
using either a swiveling head that allowed both the lens and the photosensitive
surface behind it to rotate together, or a swinging lens that moved while the
rest of the camera remained fixed. Panoramic cameras were invented for the
earliest photographic formats, including the daguerreotype, and have been
continually reintroduced, up through the “pano” feature of contemporary
smartphone cameras.
Although photography quickly found its own panoramic
formats, it was more difficult to adapt photographic imagery to the painted
panorama’s wraparound dimensions. It
was theoretically possible, using a magic lantern, to project photographic
images within a circular enclosure. Efforts to project photographic panoramas
failed, however, because the seams between image segments were too apparent.
The very qualities of optical accuracy that are now associated with
photographic verisimilitude actually worked against the panorama’s construction
of visual continuity. Painted panoramas deployed strategies of
distortion to disguise the piecemeal nature of their construction. Even if a
panoramic photograph had actually been captured as a single image by a special
camera, the multiple lenses required for projecting it would parse it into
discrete segments.
Auguste and Louis Lumière, some of the earliest inventors of
cinema, developed a remarkable attempt to resolve this quandary and merge
photographic realism with panoramic immersion. Not long after they screened
their first films in a Paris café in 1895, they began preparing their entry for
the 1900 Paris Exposition. They invented devices to capture and project a
wraparound photographic image twenty feet tall and sixty-six feet in diameter.1
They called this spectacle the Photorama. The Periphote, as they called their
panoramic camera, could rotate 360 degrees to record one continuous negative measuring
three by twenty-five inches. This image was then projected using a device that
shared its name with the spectacle itself, the Photorama. This projector would
rotate twelve apertures at 180 rpm around a static, cylindrical strip of film
that contained a single panoramic photograph.
The Photorama almost reversed the technique that the
Lumières had developed for their cinematograph, one of the first motion-picture
technologies. Both a camera and projector, the cinematograph combined the basic
structure of a magic lantern with the celluloid roll film that the Kodak
company had invented for their inexpensive box cameras. The cinematograph wound
a reel of film behind a rhythmically shuttered lens. Each frame of the film
strip was quickly exposed, either to record, by imprinting light passing in
through the lens, or to project, by filtering light passing out through the
lens from a source behind the image.
In the cinematograph, then, a strip of film rotated to move
multiple discrete images past one shutter and static lens. In the Photorama, on
the other hand, the strip of film was a single photograph that remained static
while multiple lenses and shutters moved. Cinematic projection produces a sense
of seeing things move over time, within a coherent frame. But the Photorama’s
technique of projection prioritized spatial continuity, prompting viewers to
perceive a wraparound still image, one that avoided the visible seams
introduced by other kinds of projectors or even the linked canvases of painted
panoramas.
The Photorama was successful enough at the 1900 Paris
Exposition that it was installed on the rue de Clichy in Paris in 1902, as a
permanent entertainment. It closed in 1903, however, because of its excessive
cost, and only one known copy of its unusual projector remains. Even by 1900,
it was evident that the cinematograph, rather than the Photorama, marked the
direction in which visual culture was turning—toward moving images. Several
spectacles at the Paris Exposition adapted the painted panorama from the form
of a wraparound enclosure to a scrolling form of scenery, pointing to cinema’s
future dominance of visual culture. One such spectacle, the Trans-Siberian
Railway Panorama, won a gold medal from Exposition judges.
The Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama was commissioned by the
Wagons-Lits train car company and painted by Marcel Jambon and Alexandre
Bailly. It depicted a train ride from Moscow to Beijing, using nine rolls of
painted canvas whose length totaled more than half a mile.2 Spectators could sit
in one of three actual train cars and watch out the window as scenery unfurled
between concealed cylindrical spools. To create a sense that the train car was
actually passing through a landscape, multiple layers of scenery moved past the
spectator at different distances and speeds. Closest to the train car, actual
rocks and sand representing the ground swept past on a fast-moving belt.
Further away, moving a bit more slowly, a short painted canvas presented low
bushes and vegetation. Beyond this, two larger painted canvases depicted
features of the landscape. The largest was over twenty-five feet tall, and
moved at a rate one-sixtieth the speed of the closest belt. As they gazed out
the window, passengers could “feel” the car moving through the visceral effects
of motion parallax.
The Trans-Siberian Railway Panorama demonstrates how the
formats of painted panoramas shifted over the second half of the nineteenth
century. But it also drew on photographic formats that developed during the
same period. Moving panoramas often depicted a journey—along a wagon trail, a
river, or a train line. At the same time, photographs arranged as a series were
also a popular way to collect multiple views into a virtual form of travel.
Series of photographs depicting railroads were especially prevalent in the
United States as transcontinental lines were constructed after the Civil War.
Major railroad companies commissioned professional photographers to document
progress along the line, creating images that could be used to promote the sale
of railroad bonds. Series of
numbered photographs following a railroad line were sometimes published as
plates in expensive, bound books intended for individual investors.
Railway
photographs were also commonly viewed through a stereoscope, a device that
presents each of a spectator’s eyes with a different image of the same subject,
shifted to suggest the slightly different angles from which each eye sees. This
prompts the spectator to perceptually coordinate the two images into an impression
of visual depth. Viewers triangulate their own implied position within the
pictured scene. The stereoscope was invented almost concurrently with
photography and became popular after attracting attention at the Great
Exhibition of London in 1851. The stereoscope does not require photographs and
was initially demonstrated with drawn images. But inexpensive
photographic printing methods helped inaugurate a craze for the devices in the
second half of the nineteenth century.
Like the wraparound panorama, a stereoscope offered an
immersive form of visual entertainment that seemed to embed spectators within a
representation that filled or even exceeded the limits of their gaze. While
panoramas were largely public spectacles, stereographs were collected and viewed
primarily at home. They were purchased from shops, through catalogues, and even
from door-to-door salesmen. The images ranged widely in subject matter but were
promoted predominantly as a form of visual knowledge—a way, for example, to see
Niagara Falls or take a virtual tour of Egypt. By swapping stereographs in
sequence in the stereoscope, a spectator could imagine taking such a journey.
Railway sets deliberately encouraged that idea. They often included
descriptions of the scenery on the back of the stereographs written from the
perspective of someone standing in the pictured setting.
AR and VR incorporate aesthetic strategies of immersion that
range from the camera obscura through the panorama, as well as photographic and
cinematic technologies. That is not to say they constitute the culmination or
summation of these earlier efforts. Instead, each iteration of immersive media
has constructed the magic of presence differently. The stereoscope offers a
dimensional view, albeit from only one position. The scrolling panorama might
create a sense of motion more powerfully than cinema’s moving image, but with a
much lower degree of optical realism. The Photorama offered a photorealistic
scene, but audiences didn’t find it as compelling as the carefully coordinated
visual theater of the painted panorama. Standing in a museum, strapped into a
VR headset, maybe also wrapped in a vest or gripping a controller, viewers find
both new affordances and new limitations, along with familiar elements of older
technologies.
Like AR, the camera obscura and the magic lantern mixed
actual and projected worlds. The lenses in VR headsets are based on the
principles of the nineteenth-century stereoscope. And just as a spectator
needed to manually insert stereographs, or turn a crank to rotate through
pre-loaded ones, changes of imagery in VR are triggered by gestures, whether
mapped to movements in the virtual world or actual interactions with the
device, like a click of a button on a handheld controller. To the stereoscopic
effect of depth, AR and VR add the panoramic conceit of a wraparound view, a
representation that appears to continue in any direction the user may turn. To
the static immersion of the panorama, however, AR and VR add the sense of a
dynamic scene. This effect of a living picture could be felt in a
phantasmagoria as well, as ghosts seemed to flutter into and out of view, or
inside a camera obscura, as clouds floated across a blue sky.
A history of immersive media aesthetics makes plain that the
concept of immersion is not fixed. Aesthetic and technological changes
continually alter ideas about how the magic of presence should look and feel.
These shifts do not exemplify progress so much as they communicate a desire for
whatever an “unmediated” experience of presence is assumed and imagined to be.
Facebook’s concept of presence appears in the slippage between the different
kinds of “connection” it is pursuing: why would connecting humans to computers
help people connect with one another? By pursuing the immersive potentials of
AR and VR in terms of neural interfaces, computer vision, biometric tracking,
and other methods of coupling human and machine, Facebook Reality Labs projects
suggest that we might get past the virtual, to reality itself, if we could hack
embodiment as a primary kind of interface. While this research may yield
intriguing forms of immersion in the near future, it furthers the disconnection
that social media already fosters, by formulating presence and human connection
in terms of the platforms onto which they are actively and profitably grafted.
1 Many sources have confused which device is which and have
given inaccurate descriptions of their function. I am relying on an illustrated
pamphlet authored by the Lumières and published by A. Storck in Lyon, France,
in 1902, as well as the illustrated article “Le photorama, projections
panoramiques de MM. A. et L. Lumière” from La Nature, vol. 30, 1er semestre,
Feb. 22, 1902, pp. 171–74.
2 As Erkki Huhtamo explains in Illusions in Motion (MIT
Press, 2013), most scholarly accounts have mistaken this panorama for a
different, moving panorama painted by Pavel Pyasetsky that was also shown at
the 1900 Exposition and also depicted the Trans-Siberian Railway. Pyasetsky’s
panorama scrolled by hand cranking, and was less than two feet tall—a format
often called a “parlor panorama.” The larger panorama that I discuss is
described and illustrated in “Les panoramas de l’exposition” in La Nature 28,
1er semestre, no. 1407, May 17, 1900, p. 402.
A History
of Presence. By Brooke Belisle. Art in America January 25, 2021.
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