Reviewed by:

• The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan by Paul Roquet
• Nicholaus Gutierrez (bio)

Paul Roquet’s The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan begins with a simple question about the cultural politics of virtual reality (VR): “What calls people to hand over almost all their spatial cues about their physical place in the world to a computer?” (2). In the Anglophone world, answers to that question have often been framed through the problematic but enduring tendency to treat the technology as uniquely American, given the head-mounted display’s origins in US military research and the oft-repeated narrative of cyberspace as a virtual frontier. This understanding of VR is ultimately predicated less on the technology itself than on the cultural fantasies of its immersive potential, which mobilize Western tropes of medium transparency and physical transcendence into the space of representation. But VR’s reach has exceeded the Anglophone world for more than four decades, and, as Roquet points out, the VR headset is not a metaphysical gateway—it is literally a perceptual enclosure. The reason people willingly hand over their spatial cues to a computer is as much about what is bracketed out in discussions on VR as what is included, and perhaps there is no more glaring omission in Anglophone scholarship on VR’s history than the development and reception of VR in Japan. The Immersive Enclosure remediates that omission, offering a much-needed contribution to VR studies that focuses on the cultural specificities and historical contingencies that have shaped the cultural politics of the perceptual enclosure in Japanese culture.

The first two chapters deal primarily with VR’s historical genealogies. Chapter 1, “Acoustics of the One-Person Space,” describes how the intersection between sound, space, and the built environment established the conditions for the popular acceptance of VR’s perceptual enclosure in Japan. Roquet links the normalization of headphone use to the postwar shift from multigenerational to single-family homes and an increase in urban, denser housing. As Roquet notes, “record numbers of Japanese relocated to urban environments at this time, often to live in wooden housing with notoriously thin walls and in close proximity to neighboring homes” (40–41). It was in these spaces that headphone use came to be seen as fun, “in part because it allowed for late-night listening where speaker playback would otherwise be bothersome (meiwaku) for neighbors and family members in adjoining rooms” (40). By the 1970s, the emergence of the one-room apartment—notably represented by photojournalist Tsuzuki Kyōichi as a kind of domestic cockpit—marked an emphasis on individual space that intersected with the rise of individual media use over the same period. From the mid ’70s to the late ’80s, “this personalized cockpit might have been furnished with a television, a stereo, and perhaps later in the decade a video cassette deck or video game console” (42). The space of the built environment helped to normalize personal [End Page 317] listening practices, with technologies like the Sony Walkman in turn normalizing the practice of wearing the enclosure of an immersive audio display on one’s head, a precursor to the head-mounted display of VR.

Chapter 2, “Translating the Virtual into Japanese,” seeks to reframe VR’s development history, from one that springs exclusively from American research to one that has been part of a transnational conversation between the US and Japan going back at least to the 1980s. Here, Roquet notes that the development of VR and related immersive technologies in Japan emerged not from a military but a telecommunications context. Roquet points to earlier work on teleoperators by Ishii Takemochi, who in the 1950s left a career in medicine to pursue computing after encountering Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (54). He also discusses two prominent members of the research community in the ’80s and ’90s: Hirose Michitaka, who helped organize what would become the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Tele-Existence (ICAT), and Tachi Susumu, who coined the term “tele-existence” to describe the experience of using immersive technologies. Beginning in the 1980s, researchers like Hirose...

 审阅者：

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  沉浸式围栏：日本的虚拟现实 作者：Paul Roquet
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  尼古拉斯·古铁雷斯（简介）

Paul Roquet 的《沉浸式围场：日本的虚拟现实》从一个有关虚拟现实 (VR) 文化政治的简单问题开始：“是什么促使人们将有关他们在世界上的物理位置的几乎所有空间线索交给计算机？” （2）。在英语国家，考虑到头戴式显示器起源于美国军事研究以及网络空间作为虚拟前沿的不断重复叙述，这个问题的答案往往是通过一种有问题但持久的趋势来界定的，即将该技术视为美国独有的技术。这种对虚拟现实的理解最终不是基于技术本身，而是基于其沉浸式潜力的文化幻想，这种幻想将西方媒介透明度和物理超越性的比喻调动到了表现空间中。但四十多年来，VR 的影响力已经超过了英语世界，而且正如 Roquet 指出的那样，VR 耳机并不是一个形而上学的网关，它实际上是一个感知外壳。人们愿意将空间线索交给计算机的原因与虚拟现实讨论中所包含的内容一样重要，而且在英语国家关于虚拟现实历史的学术研究中，也许没有比虚拟现实的发展和接受更明显的遗漏了。在日本。沉浸式封闭空间弥补了这一遗漏，为虚拟现实研究提供了急需的贡献，该研究重点关注塑造了日本文化中感知封闭空间的文化政治的文化特性和历史偶然事件。

前两章主要讨论 VR 的历史谱系。第一章“单人空间的声学”描述了声音、空间和建筑环境之间的交叉如何为 VR 感知封闭在日本的普遍接受奠定了条件。罗凯将耳机使用的正常化与战后从多代住宅向单户住宅的转变以及城市、更密集的住房的增加联系起来。正如罗凯指出的那样，“此时搬迁到城市环境的日本人数量创历史新高，他们通常居住在墙壁极薄且靠近邻近房屋的木屋中”（40-41）。正是在这些空间中，使用耳机被视为一种乐趣，“部分原因是它允许深夜聆听，否则扬声器的播放会给相邻房间的邻居和家人带来麻烦（meiwaku）”（40）。到了 20 世纪 70 年代，单间公寓的出现（特别是由摄影记者都筑京一代表的一种家用驾驶舱）标志着对个人空间的重视，这与同一时期个人媒体使用的兴起相交叉。从 70 年代中期到 80 年代末，“这个个性化的驾驶舱可能配备了电视、立体声音响，也许在本世纪后期还配备了录像带或视频游戏机”(42)。建筑环境的空间有助于规范个人[结束第317页]聆听实践，而索尼随身听等技术反过来又规范了将沉浸式音频显示器的外壳佩戴在头上的实践，这是头戴式显示器的前身VR 的。

第二章“将虚拟翻译成日语”试图重新构建 VR 的发展历史，从完全源自美国研究的发展历史，到至少可以追溯到 20 世纪 80 年代美国和日本之间跨国对话的一部分。 Roquet 在此指出，日本 VR 和相关沉浸式技术的发展不是源于军事，而是源于电信背景。 Roquet 提到了 Ishii Takemochi 早期关于远程操作员的工作，他在 20 世纪 50 年代在遇到 Norbert Wiener 的控制论 (54) 后放弃了医学职业，转而追求计算。他还讨论了 80 年代和 90 年代研究界的两位杰出成员：广濑道隆（Hirose Michitaka）和 Tachi Susumu，前者帮助组织了后来的国际人工现实和远程存在会议（ICAT），后者创造了术语““”远程存在”来描述使用沉浸式技术的体验。从 20 世纪 80 年代开始，像 Hirose 这样的研究人员...