A decade after Chris Milk’s claim that virtual reality functions as an “empathy machine,” scholars have rightly critiqued the medium’s capacity to generate genuine political consciousness through simulated co-presence. Less examined is whether cinematic virtual reality (CVR) can serve as a vehicle for what this paper calls critical spatial computing: decolonizing uses of extended reality (XR) – encompassing virtual, augmented, and mixed reality – that make visible the ideological processes through which digital technologies algorithmically construct our environments in order to reimagine immersive media as tools for enacting digital justice. This paper argues that CVR holds real but ultimately constrained potential for this project, evaluating that potential through a tripartite framework that proposes XR spatiality as ontologically staged, phenomenologically intersubjective, and ethically synthetic. Three interconnected case studies – including Tsai Ming-liang’s The Deserted (2017), Dennis Lo’s The Coleman House (2024), and A Resisted/ing Dance(2025) by a James Madison University (JMU) English MA student – expose a shared structural limitation, namely, that CVR can ultimately only simulate critical spatial engagement. This recognition motivates the Southwood XR project, a collaboration between Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville and JMU in which the author serves as co-PI and Creative Lead, embedding oral histories and 3D spatial scans into an open, interactive documentary platform for the residents of Southwood, Charlottesville’s largest manufactured housing community. As a proof of concept, Southwood XR demonstrates how critical spatial computing’s fuller realization demands moving beyond CVR spectatorship toward participatory spatial authorship.

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CVR Films: The Deserted (2017), The Coleman House (2024), A Resisted/ing Dance (2025)

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Dennis Lo is an Associate Professor of Global Cinemas in the English Department at James Madison University and a Visiting Scholar with the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia. Author of The Authorship of Place: A Cultural Geography of the New Chinese Cinemas (HKUP, 2020), his decade of work on location shooting as place-making has evolved toward the study of worldbuilding in site-specific XR. He is the director of a mixed-reality video essay series, Principal Investigator of the Southwood XR community engagement project, and has two articles on VR travelogues and Taiwan’s XR media industry currently under review.