Talking about virtual and augmented reality
Labels matter. Naming is both, taming and creating. In turn, the way we talk about virtual and augmented reality is important because it shapes the ways in which we think about these technological experiences, research them, and even experience them. This simple yet profound idea underpinning critical and constructivist approaches to communication studies is at the heart of the Social Grammars of Virtuality report, a yearly review of extended reality (XR) literature with a focus on social sciences output and the communication of XR technologies and experiences. However, before we delve into some of the insights from the report about how we (should) talk about virtual and augmented reality, it’s worth briefly explaining how we got here.
In 2023, the Annenberg Extended Reality Lab (or AER Lab), based at the University of Pennsylvania, released its first report titled the Social Grammars of Virtuality. This report comprises an analysis of all of the available English-language, peer-reviewed literature published on extended reality (XR) technologies within a given year. The report examines things like the geographies of knowledge production, overarching themes and areas of research, and sources of funding. It also does a deep dive into a selection of XR-themed journals and the types of theories, technologies, and methods the articles within these journals employ. As noted above, the report has a specific focus on social sciences output, and on the ways in which we communicate about XR technologies and experiences—the report has a specific section on the latter. The reason why this report emerged now is because we felt there was an unprecedented societal interest in and saturation of XR technologies and experiences in the last decade and, to accompany them, much research output, media coverage, and corporate hype. With that in mind, our team launched the first issue of the Social Grammars of Virtuality report because we felt the time was ripe to systematically take stock of the XR field of knowledge. In hindsight, another part of the motivation driving both, the Social Grammars of Virtuality report and the Lab behind it was an act of rebellion against corporate XR hype and a desire to fact check our own knowledge.
So, what have we learnt from the first two issues about the ways in which we (should) talk and write about XR and more specifically, virtual and augmented reality? There are many ways the findings could be delineated, and I attempt to outline some of those in more depth below. Most saliently, however, the articles we’ve reviewed over the past couple of years show that the academic community is using a very limited set of terms (like ‘presence’ and ‘immersion’) to describe a vast range of XR technologies and experiences and point toward the need to clarify, if not expand, this terminology.
I feature two annotated bibliography entries from the Social Grammars of Virtuality report at the bottom of this article (Murphy and Skarbez (2022), who tackle the term ‘presence’ and Boellstorff (2024), who untangles the components of the term ‘metaverse’) which illustrate the pressing need to clarify our XR terminology. Still, other articles make the case for an ethical expansion of the terms we use to describe XR experiences. For example, Harley (2022) critiques the discursive newness of VR by highlighting the problematic colonial roots of calling VR a new frontier, a digital wild West, or a space to be colonized. In doing so, Harley builds upon the previous works of others like Chesher (1994) and Nakamura (2020). Others, like Roquet (2023) and Girginova (2025) call for an expansion of the current understandings of XR beyond Western perspectives and demonstrate the impact varied cultural contexts have on the meanings and uses of these technologies.
The Social Grammars of Virtuality report points toward a second generative area for vocabulary to help us shape how we talk and write about XR experiences, too: the non-mediated. For example, Whittaker (2023) presents the first systematic study of ‘onboarding’ and ‘offboarding’—the processes used to usher audiences into virtual reality experiences—and so makes a case for the expansion of what we consider to be a virtual reality encounter. Similarly, Harley (2023) explores how to design XR media for and with sensory practices in mind. Others still, like Alha et al. (2023), classify the ways in which the physical environment is incorporated within AR gaming experiences and give us an additional toolkit of terms to describe user–XR encounters like ‘blending’, which describes the interaction between a phone’s camera recognizing suitable physical locations for game content to appear.
“Do the ways in which we communicate about and through XR open more possibilities for expression or foreclose them?”
It’s worth noting that the majority of the articles examined within the first issue of the Social Grammars (covering publications in 2022), focused on virtual reality technologies and experiences. However, by the second issue (covering publications from 2023), we were already seeing a significant growth of works focusing on AR and we expect the third issue (to be released in 2025) to continue this trend and feature articles that examine the relationship between XR and artificial intelligence (AI). Simultaneously, the release of Apple’s Vision Pro headset in 2024 has also shifted popular discourse away from VR and AR toward spatial computing (see CAVRN blog post from Blackman and Harley). This all prompts us to the thought that the experiences comprising XR are themselves rather unstable and constantly evolving and reinforces the notion that the language we use to describe them needs to evolve, too. Nonetheless, as we do so, we need to ask ourselves: do the ways in which we communicate about and through XR open more possibilities for expression or foreclose them?
In sum, this brief analysis of how we talk about virtual and augmented reality from the Social Grammars of Virtuality report shows that while there are some promising developments, we are ultimately quite limited in our language and most often, uncritically circulate several keywords like ‘immersion’ or ‘presence’. Part of this recycling may not be bad, whereas another part of it may be attributed to academic cycles and the pressures of publication and citation hierarchies. Nonetheless, what we may just need is to be a bit more rebellious when it comes to talking about virtual and augmented reality, too.
Annotated Entry from Issue 1, The Language of XR:
Murphy, D., & Skarbez, R. (2022). What Do We Mean When We Say “Presence”?. PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 29, 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres_a_00360
This article, aptly published in a journal named Presence, builds on a survey that catalogues meanings and intellectual roots of the term presence (Skarbez, Brooks & Whitton, 2017). The authors examine additional literature about the term and apply philosophical and psychological lenses to unpack its most common meanings. Three common descriptions emerge: “Presence as (or as following from) “the assumption of disbelief,” presence as the “illusion of nonmediation,” and presence as “(the feeling of) being there,”” (pg. 171). The authors analyze the implicit assumptions behind each of these constructions of presence, paying particular attention to how they each connect to attention. In turn, Murphy and Skarbez identify the understandings of presence that seem the most fruitful (and those that do not), highlighting that the notion of presence is further complicated by the idea that “presence has aspects that cannot be probed or shaped by the will and, separately, aspects that can,” (pg. 172).
The authors urge those investigating presence in future studies to be specific about the (sub)definitions and assumptions of presence they subscribe to, especially those using instrument(s) to measure presence. Simultaneously, a poignant footnote cautions against the too abundant splintering of the term, which may be equally confusing. In this provocatively oscillating style, the authors raise several additional ideas. For instance, they probe whether the role of the VR user ought to be framed in a positive and agentic light, via her effortfully achieved creation of belief, as opposed to her suspension of disbelief. This points to the call for a clarification of whether the XR experiences we study function via perceptual means only or, via cognitive effort, too. It also raises questions about how we understand audiences in the context of XR.
Murphy and Skarbez also highlight the oppositional experiences of VR users who cannot stop themselves from having physical reactions (like sweaty palms) to certain experiences, like being positioned atop a thin wooden plank as it is suspended high in mid-air above a city, despite their active knowledge that what they are experiencing is not real. At the same time, they note that our very knowledge of the fact that we are using a VR system, no matter how advanced, is enough to pollute our experience, belief, and presence in it. It is here that the authors question the binary conception of presence. It either exists or it doesn’t. They instead advocate for a more nuanced position of thresholds, which must be met in order for presence to occur. What these thresholds look like and for whom is now the challenge of future research to discover.
Annotated Entry from Issue 2, The Language of Extended Reality Technologies and Experiences:
Boellstorff, T. (2024). Toward anthropologies of the metaverse. American Ethnologist, 51(1), 47–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13228
This article argues that anthropology, which has long studied socio-cultural practices in a range of non-mediated and mediated settings, can help us untangle the presently abundant misconceptions about the metaverse. Specifically, the author identifies four optional characteristics of the metaverse that are frequently and misleadingly described as necessary features: first, that VR is necessary to access the metaverse. Boellstorff gives the example of Second Life as a popular metaverse or virtual place that does not require VR. To underscore the proposed separation of the metaverse from VR, the author argues that “what makes the metaverse real is social immersion not sensory immersion” (p. 4). Further, Boellstorff suggests that since VR is primarily a sensory medium, it should more accurately be renamed “sensory immersion” while reserving the term virtual reality for broader consumption.
Second, the author dismantles interoperability between metaverses as a benefit; to the contrary, he argues that there is value in being able to separate one’s identity in different online as well as offline settings. Third, the need for a large scale metaverse is debunked as there is value in various-sized communities—including smaller fringe ones and lastly, crypto currency is highlighted as yet another optional feature. The author argues that the framing of these optional characteristics as fundamental to a metaverse primarily benefits the big corporations building it, and further, that anthropology has valuable tools to help us decolonize future visions from promotional rhetoric and technological “lock-in.”
This piece also tackles the notion that the metaverse “is already passé—supplanted by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT” (p. 1). In response, the author suggests that uninspired corporate visions have contributed to pushing the metaverse (and arguably VR has had a similar fate) into a hype cycle that inevitably involves becoming supplanted by the next big technology. Yet, the metaverse’s history dates back to the 19th century telegraph and will continue to evolve as a place for virtual interaction “linked to physical world-place” (p. 7).
References
Alha, K., Leorke, D., Koskinen, E., & Paavilainen, J. (2023). Augmented play: An analysis of augmented reality features in location-based games. Convergence, 29(2), 342–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231156495
Chesher, C. (1994). Colonizing virtual reality: Construction of the discourse of virtual reality. Cultronix, 1(1), 1–27.
Girginova, K. (2025). Global visions for a metaverse. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 28(1), 300–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231224799
Harley, D. (2022). “This would be sweet in VR”: On the discursive newness of virtual reality. New Media & Society, 26(4), 2151–2167. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221084655
Harley, D. (2023). Virtual narratives, physical bodies: Designing diegetic sensory experiences for virtual reality. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231178915
Nakamura, L. (2020). Feeling good about feeling bad: Virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy. Journal of Visual Culture, 19(1), 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259
Roquet, P. (2023). Japan’s Retreat to the Metaverse. Media, Culture & Society, 45(7), 1501–1510. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437231182001
Skarbez, R., Brooks, Jr, F. P., & Whitton, M. C. (2017). A survey of presence and related concepts. ACM computing surveys (CSUR), 50(6), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134301
Whittaker, L. (2023). Onboarding and offboarding in virtual reality: A user-centred framework for audience experience across genres and spaces. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231187329
Recommended citation
Girginova, K. (January, 2025). Talking about virtual and augmented reality. Critical Augmented and Virtual Reality Researchers Network (CAVRN). https://cavrn.org/talking-about-virtual-and-augmented-reality/
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