ABSTRACT
Since the concept and technology of virtual reality (VR) remain within the restricted horizon of iconic communication, we will miss the radical possibilities and fundamental challenges that virtual reality poses to our most deeply held ideas of what communication is or can be. VR may be more than a medium of representation that is submitted to the order and rule of the real. It has the potential to become a laboratory in which to challenge and investigate the metaphysics of representation. Simulation intervenes in the metaphysics of representation by deconstructing the binary opposition real/imitation. This deconstruction comprises a double gesture that inverts the relationship between representations and the "real world" and introduces a new and undecidable concept that is displaced outside the very system that had been inverted. As a result, simulation constitutes a significant challenge to the concept of the "essential copy" and the criteria of realism by which the technology of VR has been evaluated, understood, and explained.
