The first lecture provided a well rounded introduction to immersive media – as someone who can ignore historic context I enjoyed hearing about some of the instances where VR or immersive media has been buzzwords in the past. Learning this information revealed how connected the definitions and current technology tend to be. Brenda Laurel’s 8 affordances of VR then provided a good jumping off point for approaching a definition for Virtual Reality, but still read to me as a definition tied too specifically to the technical affordances of the time. Although I agree with all points, and believe they can be used to categorize current hardware, I have a hard time accepting them as more than a hardware specific definitions. I understand VR as anything that attempts to evoke the feeling of non-mediation. Although all the points are methods that help eliminate the feeling of mediation, they close off other potential avenues for achieving the same goal.
