There is a tendency to assume that VR immerses its users in a virtual space, opening up the possibility for the kind of exploration that would appear to enhance the user’s agency, at least within the virtual world. But VR’s spatial operations and user address are more complicated than that. As recent work from scholars such as Jenna Ng, Jihoon Kim, and Alison Griffiths has made clear, these operations and address involve negotiating the visual illusion with the user’s bodily experience in the exhibition space. My paper explores how such negotiation is enacted through the use of redirected walking in cinematic VR projects. While many VR experiences map the movements displayed through the headset to the user’s actual movements in a one-to-one manner, redirected walking introduces slight mismatches so that it seems that the user is turning her head more or less than she really is, that she is walking a greater or lesser distance than she really is, or that her trajectory is curved to a greater or lesser extent than it really is. With this technique, the user feels her body moving, and she sees movements displayed through the headset. But, while the user may perceive these movements to be aligned with one another, they are not the same. The technique thus makes it possible for works to present a seemingly open virtual environment that feels unbound from the four walls of the exhibition space. Examining the ways in which some of the most notable works in recent iterations of the Venice Film Festival’s Immersive competition have employed redirected walking, I explore how the relative movements presented within the headset and experienced by the user underpin these VR works’ aesthetic operations.

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CVR experience: Songs for a Passerby (2023)

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Ariel Rogers is an Associate Professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. She is the author of Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies (2013) and On the Screen: Displaying the Moving Image, 1926-1942 (2019) as well as essays on topics such as widescreen cinema, digital cinema, special effects, screen technologies, and virtual reality. She is currently completing a third book project that revisits the concept of the cinematic frame and the practice of cinematic framing in light of contemporary uses of virtual reality.