1. I use “medium” loosely here. VR is not yet a fully formed medium in the way that cinema, video games, theatre, and so on, are.
2. Chris Milk and Gabo Arora, “How Virtual Reality Makes the World a Better Place,” World Economic Forum, 1 September 2015, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/09/how-virtual-reality-makes-the-world-a-better-place/ (accessed 14 March 2023).
3. Kate Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence,” Studies in Documentary Film 12.2 (2018): 119–131; Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006); Lilie Chouliaraki, “Improper Distance: Towards a Critical Account of Solidarity as Irony,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14.4 (2011): 363–381; Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Dirk Eitzen, “The Problems and Potentials of VR for Documentary Storytelling,” Cinergie 19 (2021): 43–55. See also Chris Milk, “How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine” (TED talk, March 2015), https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine (accessed 18 March 2023).
4. I have analyzed the inherent subjectivity of VR’s base apparatus—as opposed to that of cinema—in Philippe Bédard, “La machine subjective ? Les appropriations cinématographiques des dispositifs immersifs contemporains,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28.1 (2019) : 66–92. An English version of this article is in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.
5. Mads Larsen, “Virtual Sidekick: Second-Person POV in Narrative VR,” Journal of Screenwriting 9.1 (2018): 73–83.