ABSTRACT
This chapter explores implications for human identity, in three senses: psychological well-being, a deeper ‘sense of self,’ and digital privacy. In each case, it highlights negative and positive discoveries and potentials regarding existing and emergent technologies. Historians trace the origins of virtual reality (VR) – technologically rendered artificial environments – to the 1830s invention of 3D stereoscopes. The VR abbreviation is specific to computer-powered technologies, typically based on ‘head-mounted displays’ or projections onto the wall-screens of a chamber or room. Most mass-market VR platforms are now SVR – Internet-connected social media – also offering VR-enhanced versions of other online utilizations: chat, games, passive entertainment, exercise, education, work. However weird the metaverse proves, it’s already that way where VR concerns users’ inmost sense of self. ‘Virtual selfhood’ scholarship has long focused on avatars, on-screen representations of users, created or selected by them.
