ABSTRACT
This chapter looks selectively at three uses of VR in the consumer market—video games, social networking and pornography—and, following critical analysis of each use of VR, determines what the successes and weaknesses of these instantiations of VR mean in the context of the impact of consumer VR. Each of these generic uses of consumer VR represents a re-mediation of existing media into VR and, as such, means that native, built-for-VR experiences either are jostling for attention with media texts designed for other mediums or are being ignored in the design process altogether as developers wait for consumer VR technologies to match their vision of co-presence and haptic interfaces. In particular, early consumer VR content lacks the necessary dynamics to foster empathy, and while VR has been proposed as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ at the early stage of consumer VR, there is some work to do before this claim holds weight.
