telephone calls

It might seem that virtual reality is a medium, but not a place. For example, people have conversations on the telephone, and they could get married during a conference call, but we do not think of telephone conversations as happening in a unified place separate from the locations of the people on either end of the line.

A virtual locale becomes a place when it provides a perceived continuum that is divided into regions that hold a set of norms or expectations. It is not the visual connection that matters -- a video phone would not establish a new place. What matters is when sensory channels provide a continuous area that becomes a field of possible movements, so those movements and their sub-areas can be distinguished and laid open to norms and expectations.

If, instead of voices coming over a conference call, I saw my committee members from the perspective of my virtual body in a virtual room, looking at the virtual bodies of the other committee members, and if I could virtually pound the table, or turn my back on the others, if the virtual space became differentiated into regions for talking and regions for looking away, if how I held my virtual body mattered in a way that my bodily position does not matter when I talk on the telephone, then the meeting would be taking place there in that virtual room.

On the telephone I can be in my bathrobe, and with advanced virtual reality I presumably could also be in my bathrobe at home, but my virtual body might have to be properly dressed lest it violate some norm of the place. I might want to violate that norm for some reason, but it is the presence of the norm on the spatiality that makes the virtual area into a place.

Index
virtual places
Place theory outline