Epilogue

Abstract

The epilogue brings the reader up-to-date with the VR industry. It discusses Facebook’s rebranding of Meta and its launch of the metaverse as well as Apple’s announced Vision Pro headset and its framing of immersive technology as spatial computing. These Big Tech maneuvers place VR in a larger context of technologies and platforms meant to blur the distinction between physical and virtual worlds. With this shift of focus in marketing, VR’s potential as a good technology has faded. Even if this fantasy was imperfect, the book concludes by suggesting that these imperfections are preferable to allowing the Big Tech ethos of innovation regardless of harms and costs to persist. Fantasies of tech otherwise are necessary for bringing about other configurations between society and technology.