Research Article
Immersion – new media and old ambitions

i.christie@bbk.ac.uk
Abstract
As immersive exhibitions and entertainments have become fashionable, it should be remembered that they have a long history, stretching back to the panoramas of the 18th century and the many optical novelties of the Victorian era, leading up to cinema and subsequent attempts to make this a more immersive experience. More recently, the concepts of cyberspace and the metaverse have been imported from science fiction to describe virtual experiences now available through digital media. Remediation theory should explain these, as well as their evident popularity, yet cultural and aesthetic hostility to such spatial illusions is almost as old as the new media themselves, and has reappeared in response to immersive exhibitions.
Keywords
immersivepanoramastereoscopiccyberspacemetaverseremediationspaceCopyright statement © The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License
Cite this article Christie, I. (2024), ‘Immersion – new media and old ambitions’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a03 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a03

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The Editors reveal their ambitions for the newly relaunched Journal of the British Academy, including an explanation of the types of articles that it will contain in future. There is also a description of the contents of the double issue with which the Journal is being relaunched.

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