Review of The Changing Face of VR: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience Across Multiple Industries

Abstract

The Changing Face of VR: Pushing the Boundaries of Experience Across Multiple Industries discusses how virtual reality (VR) has been used to improve users’ experience with watching performances, news stories, nature, and other genres, and has been written by “practitioners and academics from different disciplines” (p. 8). The book analyzes and theorizes what VR is already doing and pushes readers to think, “what can and will VR do [in the future]? (p. 8).” The 11 chapters of this book distinctly show readers the immense technological growth in VR applications since its incipient stages in the mid-2010s and create hope for VR to become mainstream one day. The book was “written before Meta’s massive investment in VR” (p. 2) and before Apple’s June 2023 announcement of their Apple Vision Pro. Apple announced that with the Vision Pro you “can spread your work out across an array of large, digital monitors that are invisible to everyone else in the room” and “watch movies and play games on a 100-foot-wide virtual screen, or have FaceTime chats with friends” (Gershgorn, 2023). Such technology only demonstrates the potential for VR to go mainstream and pushes for the need to research VR applications further. This edited collection keeps readers interested in the technology and its far-reaching implications.