Virtuality Does Not Exist: Perception at the Endpoint of VR

Abstract

The idea of complete virtuality has accompanied virtual reality research since its beginnings. It appears as an implicit boundary concept in visionary ideas such as Sutherland's Ultimate Display as well as in formal classifications, particularly in Milgram and Kishino's reality-virtuality continuum. At the same time, for over three decades there has been broad, interdisciplinary criticism that questions this assumption from very different theoretical perspectives. This text reconstructs this landscape and shows that, despite its heterogeneity, it repeatedly encounters the same structural limit: inherent incompleteness of the perceptual mediation. On this basis, we use an event field theory as a transfer function of perception to describe the technologically feasible state space with transformable dimensions. It is shown that a state of complete virtuality cannot be defined under these conditions. Virtual reality is thus not an approximation of an endpoint, but merely a specific configuration within the space of perception. The real question, therefore, is whether the concept of a completely virtual perception endpoint can be defined conclusively at all. The article argues that virtuality is not an unattainable limit of immersive technology, but rather an insufficiently defined concept within the structurally constrained space of mediated perception.