The Immersive Enclosure

The Immersive Enclosure is timely in the most profound sense: it offers a glimpse of a future that we need to act upon now in order to address its potential pitfalls, which include the wholesale commercial mediation of experience. Paul Roquet does a brilliant job of drawing on the culturally specific case of Japan's uptake of VR to provide insights of universal relevance and urgent importance as we confront the prospect that reality itself is becoming the next frontier of the surveillance economy. -- Mark Andrejevic, author of <i>Automated Media</i> Paul Roquet's timely book offers a refreshing new take on VR as a consumer technology. Situating the development of VR within Japan's robust media networks of anime, manga, visual novels, and video games, he deftly illuminates the ways VR is also seen as a panacea to the country's shrinking labor force. -- Yuriko Furuhata, author of <i>Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control</i> This book is a must-read for scholars in media studies and general readers alike fascinated by the flawed revolutionary potential of VR. Roquet makes a powerful case for attending to the cultural and aesthetic conditions of possibility necessary for embracing virtual reality. -- James J. Hodge, author of <i>Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art</i> Immersive Enclosure tells a startlingly different story about VR. Working expertly across discourses, technologies, and fantasies about virtual reality in Japan, Roquet reveals a homology between the structuring of perceptual space and social space that utterly challenges our understanding of the past and future of VR media. The urgent question emerges with breathtaking clarity: what to make of a collective desire for one-person space? -- Thomas Lamarre, author of <i>The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media</i> An intriguing analysis of virtual reality as a new vessel for a contaminated kind of individualism, the product of people retreating deeper into personal devices instead of the larger, collective world. * Kotaku * [This book] offers a bounty of insights for historians of technology. -- Yulia Frumer * H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews * The Immersive Enclosure offers an antidote to Western-focused, and especially American-focused, studies of VR, while also underscoring the universal promises and perils that VR holds for contemporary, globalized societies everywhere. . . Highly recommended. * Choice Reviews * Roquet successfully demonstrates how virtual reality in Japan emerges from a uniquely cultural and historical perspective, inspiring others to address the local specificity of their virtual reality. The Immersive Enclosure can be their guide. -- Michael Vallance * Japan Review *