As [users] enter the virtual world, their depth of engagement gradually meanders away from here until they cross the threshold of involvement. Now they are absorbed in the virtual world, similar to being in an engrossing book.
The question isn’t whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. This is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game. (Pimentel and Teixeira, Virtual Reality, 15) (p: 89)
For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world ... [] ... “the text as world” is only one possible conceptualization among many others... (p: 90)
In a textual world these meanings form a cosmos. “How does a world exist as a world?” asks Michael Heim, theorist of virtual reality. “A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole.’’ It is “not a collection of things but an active usage that relates things together, that links them. . . . World makes a web-like totality. . . . World is a total environment or surround space” (Virtual Realism, 90– 91). (p:91)
The question isn’t whether the created world is as real as the physical world, but whether the created world is real enough for you to suspend your disbelief for a period of time. This is the same mental shift that happens when you get wrapped up in a good novel or become absorbed in playing a computer game. (Pimentel and Teixeira, Virtual Reality, 15) (p: 89)
For immersion to take place, the text must offer an expanse to be immersed within, and this expanse, in a blatantly mixed metaphor, is not an ocean but a textual world ... [] ... “the text as world” is only one possible conceptualization among many others... (p: 90)
In a textual world these meanings form a cosmos. “How does a world exist as a world?” asks Michael Heim, theorist of virtual reality. “A world is not a collection of fragments, nor even an amalgam of pieces. It is a felt totality or whole.’’ It is “not a collection of things but an active usage that relates things together, that links them. . . . World makes a web-like totality. . . . World is a total environment or surround space” (Virtual Realism, 90– 91). (p:91)
