Page - 160 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

160 | Michael R. Heim www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 159–181 posttraumatic stress disorder and to reduce flying phobias.2 One Australian man used the gear to witness the birth of his child, with his wife 4,000 miles away.3 Film repositories like Netflix offer virtual theaters where online attendees can observe one another’s reactions. the industry upswing began in 2014 when fa- cebook purchased the pioneering VR firm Oculus (Irvine, California) for $2 bil- lion. At the time of writing, several companies are pushing Vr initiatives that in many cases include cooperation between software developers and hardware manufacturers. A flurry of market activity includes: • Oculus in samsung Gear Vr • Google Daydream View for Android phones • Sony PlayStation Project Morpheus VR headset • htC’s Vive Vr headset • GoPro’s 360-degree capture rig • Vuzix’s iWear 720 headset • samsung’s Vr camera, the Gear 360 this article draws on the author’s experiences with the Oculus / samsung Gear that combines 3-D software (Oculus) running on a samsung smartphone (Gal- axy Note 4 and 5) mounted inside the samsung Gear Vr headset, a relatively inexpensive and functional setup. Virtual-world experiences are documented from this setup with screen shots and video captures available on youtube, to provide the reader with visual references for the argument. the experiences described fit into what might be called the third wave of VR, a third push to rein- vent media through immersive simulation. this “Wave 3” revives the recurrent cultural forecast that Vr will change everything. Prior to this wave came two others, one in the 1990s and another at the turn of the 21st century. these prior waves were about Vr concepts4 and Vr aesthetics5 respectively, or so it seems to this author, as the on-and-off phases of VR appear to repeat over decades.6 While major players like Facebook, Samsung, Google, and Microsoft are en- tering the field of VR, the related field of Augmented Reality (AR) is held out by Apple as the most promising future for media. instead of occluding the actual surroundings, Ar overlays sense perception with virtualized information. see- through lenses add visual information much like an iPhone camera that shows the amount of zoom or filters that go into a capture of the given environment. AR thus avoids the “hooded” effect of VR headsets that insulate and replace 2 Wiederhold/rizzo 2005, 183–185. 3 Anon 2015. 4 for an early theoretical discussion of Vr, see heim 1993. 5 for a discussion of many of the aesthetic experiments, see heim 1998. 6 For a more general discussion of the phases of reality / virtuality fluctuations throughout cultural his- tory, see heim 2013 and heim 2017.