CAVE-Wednesday Section

In the cave, many, including myself, were very eager to take the tracking glasses and essentially attain subjectivity in virtual reality. The way one enabled to be attain such a privileged perspective in the virtual space is to subject yourself to constant capture of your physical position. Almost like a metaphor for Deleuze's societies of control, the continuous capture of the viewer position gives the viewer central, thus privileged, point of view, but the status of the perspective is challenged at the outset. With many people in the room not all could wear the tracking glasses, the others wore 3D glasses and they could only see an approximation of what the person with the tracking glasses saw. The professor referred to the discrepancy between what the people see as distortion. This distortion increased with the distance from the “central” subject with the tracking glasses. It was interesting to think about how this distortion can be viewed as different perspectives that appear to deviate from a “centralized” subject; those with the regular glasses saw the objects in the CAVE at different angles depending on your relation to the tracking glasses. This meant that at times it was difficult to read what the person with the tracking glasses was focusing on, but, it also meant that you could look at something else with equal facility. I guess what really interested me is the relation between visual distortion and political or ideological deviance.