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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
One of the advantages of VR, according to its proponents, is how the experience can transcend time and place while allowing the viewer to recognise the interplay of familiar cultural elements. Cultural presence is the viewer's experience of being in a specific (familiar or unfamiliar) cultural context at a specific time (Champion, 2011); for example, a European viewer immersed in a VR work that simulates the Forbidden City of 200 years ago; ideally, the distance between the viewer and the work is collapsed when the viewer is immersed in the cultural context and this may change the viewer's preconceived perception about the Forbidden City.
In the previous chapter, I provided a critical perspective for looking at the production of digital immersive art and how viewers react to it as a cultural product. In many cases, there is a disparity between VR creators’ intentions and the audience's reception. Chris Milk (2015), an entrepreneur and immersive art creator, has a much-discussed assertation about audience experience in VR; he claims that VR creates ‘the ultimate empathy machine’ since it allows a user to empathise with another person deeply. However, some scholars and art critics claim that what the user has experienced is not real empathy since 360-degree video of VR is sometimes just a first-person point of view without a ‘phantom-subjective image’ (Hassan, 2020; Messham- Muir, 2018), and empathy requires a permeable boundary between ‘me and you’ allowing two people to mingle in a shared mental space (Rifkin, 2009). As I have discussed in the previous chapters, China's government see digital technology as a way to rejuvenate Chinese culture; and cultural institutions in China hope VR can augment viewers’ cultural experience. In light of the dynamics of digital immersive art production (as discussed in Chapter 5), I focus on whether there is a disparity between the cultural institutions’ display intention and the viewer's actual experience of VR.
In this chapter, I explore two questions: first, how does VR impact the viewer's cultural presence? Second, how do Chinese audiences react to how VR presents Chinese culture?
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