Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) has often been narrated as if it emerged ex nihilo, whether through Lanier’s early proclamations of a new epoch, Rheingold’s celebration of Sensorama, or, particularly in Japan, the rhetoric of a “first year of VR” that accompanied the release of the Oculus Rift. Yet from a cultural and artistic perspective, VR was not born “out of nothing” but is situated within historical genealogies of media such as panoramas, theater, cinema, and interactive art. This essay proposes the concept of convergence friction to describe VR’s distinctiveness: when heterogeneous media traditions intersect in VR, their tensions persist rather than resolve into unified forms. Unlike cinema and television, which quickly absorbed such frictions into stable narrative and broadcast languages, VR sustains them as productive resources. Through close readings of three seminal early works, Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE (1993), Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder (1993), and Char Davies’s Osmose (1995), this essay traces how embodiment, collectivity, and bodily rhythm became principles of immersion while colliding with earlier media legacies. Contemporary VR artworks such as Notes on Blindness (2016), Carne y Arena (2017), Chalkroom (2018), and AI History 1890–2090 (2023) extend these frictions in new directions, demonstrating that VR is continually redefined at the threshold between past and future media. By theorizing VR as a site of convergence friction, this essay argues that its incompleteness, its refusal to settle into a stable language, is not a deficiency but the very condition of its artistic and cultural significance. VR is not ex nihilo but perpetually reborn, sustained by unresolved genealogies and anticipatory futures.
Was VR truly born “out of nothing”?
There has been no shortage of accounts that describe VR as having emerged ex nihilo. Rheingold (1991), for instance, took Sensorama as an example to portray VR as an immersion machine severed from earlier technological lineages, while Lanier (1989), in his early statements, depicted VR as a new starting point in human history. Moreover, when the Oculus Rift was released in 2016, media discourse in Japan frequently proclaimed the year as VR gannen—the so-called “first year of VR”—spreading a rhetoric that positioned VR as a rupture from its historical genealogy.
From a cultural perspective, however, VR is not ex nihilo but exists under the influence of preceding media, in friction with them. What we call VR today emerges precisely on the strata of cultural lineages such as shadow play, panoramas, theater, cinema, and interactive art. Conventional theories have tended to describe VR as something that eventually converged after its initial frictions with earlier media. Yet this view also invites doubt: when one examines VR artworks closely, it becomes evident that such frictions do not resolve into convergence but rather persist. In other words, it is the persistence of friction itself that surfaces as VR’s distinctiveness. From this standpoint, VR ought to be redefined as a medium that continuously sustains the tensions among different media. The question that follows is therefore straightforward: How has VR absorbed past media, and in what ways has it secured its uniqueness by maintaining these frictions?
VR has often been situated along the continuum of earlier media, particularly in Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) theory of remediation and Grau’s (2003) history of immersion. These frameworks persuasively argue that VR, like cinema and panoramas, repeats historical precedents and eventually converges into established forms. Yet precisely because of this emphasis, they have not sufficiently accounted for the ways in which VR incorporates heterogeneous genealogies and repeatedly exposes frictions and contradictions. Bolter and Grusin’s model, in particular, stresses the “smooth integration” of old media elements into new media, while Grau’s account frames VR as a “digital re-enactment of the panorama,” converging within the history of immersion. The works themselves, however, insist otherwise: VR is not a medium that converges seamlessly, but one that sustains the frictions of convergence without resolving them.
From a media-archeological standpoint, this essay treats VR not as a medium with a singular origin or a linear developmental path, but as a stratified site where heterogeneous media logics remain simultaneously active. In this sense, the argument draws on Huhtamo’s emphasis on media archeology as a method for tracing recurring cultural logics and unresolved “topoi,” rather than for establishing clean genealogies of invention (Huhtamo, 2011). What matters here is not simply that VR remediates earlier media, but how those inheritances persist as inconsistencies that resist closure.
This methodological positioning clarifies the present essay’s divergence from some influential histories of immersion. While Grau’s account provides a crucial genealogy for understanding VR within longer traditions of panoramic and immersive image cultures, it tends to foreground continuity and the progressive intensification of immersion. By contrast, the analysis developed here attends to what does not converge: the points at which embodiment, spatialization, narration, and technical mediation collide without stabilizing into a unified language. “Convergence friction” is proposed precisely to name this persistence of incompatibility as an operative condition of VR, and to extend media-archeological inquiry from recovered continuities to enduring contradictions.
For this reason, the present essay introduces the concept of “convergence friction” as a critical lens for understanding VR. Convergence friction refers to the phenomenon whereby, when heterogeneous media are recombined within VR, they do not necessarily integrate smoothly but instead sustain ongoing tensions. The “VR” addressed in this essay does not refer to mere three-dimensional imagery or commercial game-like simulations. While such media may share similar technological foundations, their logic remains subordinate to training or play. What this essay takes as its object is instead the kind of environment in which the bodily rhythms of the spectator—walking, speaking, breathing—intervene directly in the generation of space, thereby constituting the immersive experience itself. Within this scope are included “sites of embodied immersion” such as HMD-based systems, CAVE installations, and social VR. In the context of Murray’s (1997) notion of a “space for experiencing stories” and Grau’s (2003) genealogy of immersion, the form of VR considered here is precisely that in which bodily presence itself constitutes the medium.
The ancient Greek allegory of the cave offers a paradigmatic structure in which humans mistake shadows for reality, marking an epistemological origin of immersive experience. McLuhan (1964) famously remarked that “the content of any new medium is always an old medium,” while Huhtamo (2011) discussed the “cyclical topos of immersion.” Both indicate how media generate new forms of expression precisely by repeating earlier ones. From this theoretical standpoint, VR should be understood as an environment in which the body is reconnected to the world while harboring unresolved tensions—a “site of thinking in progress.” From this perspective, the present essay turns to three seminal works—EVE (1993), Placeholder (1993), and Osmose (1995)—to examine how VR art has been constituted through what I call “convergence friction.”
VR’s distinctiveness lies in the quality of its convergence. Whereas cinema and television dissolved frictions and smoothly settled into unified languages, VR continues to harbor contradictions and tensions in an unfinished state. What emerges here is a horizon different from the “integrated convergence” depicted in existing theories of remediation and histories of immersion. By treating friction itself as a resource, VR reopens a new framework for thinking about artistic practice.
From the experimental spaces of the 1990s
The early VR works of the 1990s emerged not as mere technological experiments but as arenas of convergence friction, where heterogeneous media logics intersected. Whereas cinema and television rapidly acquired unified languages, VR continues to carry a state of incompleteness. To understand why, one must attend to how pioneering artistic works incorporated diverse media elements and, rather than integrating them, exposed them as friction. Here I focus on three representative early cases of VR art: Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE (1993), Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder (1993), and Char Davies’s Osmose (1995). Each of these works reconfigured elements such as embodiment, environment, and collectivity, presenting VR as a “habitable media space.” Yet their experiments did not culminate in smooth convergence; instead, they continually collided with the legacies of panoramas, theater, and performative interaction.
EVE visualized the spectator’s bodily operations through an architectural-scale re-enactment of the panorama; Placeholder inscribed the generation of improvised narrative into the environment; and Osmose transformed internal rhythms such as breathing and balance into poetic principles of immersion. Taken together, these works demonstrate that VR appears less as a “new” medium than as an “unfinished convergence of many media.” With these three cases as a guide, let us examine how VR has established its distinctiveness by turning friction into a resource.
EVE (1993, Jeffrey Shaw)
Jeffrey Shaw’s EVE, unveiled in 1993, was a large-scale VR installation introduced as an “extended panorama experience.” It stands in continuity with the “Expanded Cinema” experiments of the 1960s, inheriting their concern with the integration of body, space, and image (ZKM/Heinrich Klotz, 1997). At the center of a large dome, two video projectors were mounted on motor-driven pan/tilt devices (robotic arms), enabling the projected image to move across any part of the dome’s interior surface. One spectator would wear a special helmet (or cap) equipped with a spatial tracking device, which detected the position and angle of the head and controlled the orientation of the projectors. As a result, the projected image always followed the viewer’s line of sight. This mechanism allowed the spectator to shift the frame of vision freely across the dome’s surface and to interactively explore the computer-generated virtual world displayed there. The spectator’s bodily actions—operating the camera and moving the rotating platform—were directly reflected in the framing of the image; instead of sitting passively before a fixed screen as in traditional cinema, bodily movement itself drove the transformation of the environment. Footage from the time (Shaw, 2015) documents how turning the platform and moving the camera vertically caused landscapes to unfold vividly. Grau (2003) has been read to frame this installation as a “digital re-enactment of the 19th-century panorama,” a perspective that underscores its transformation of passive viewing into active engagement Figure 1. Shaw, J. (1993). EVE [Installation remediating panoramic painting traditions through computational interactivity, demonstrating spatial convergence of architectural and digital media]. Jeffrey Shaw Compendium. https://www.jeffreyshawcompendium.com/platform/eve/. © Jeffrey Shaw.
Placeholder (1993, Brenda Laurel & Rachel Strickland)
Placeholder was a VR experience constructed from natural environments filmed in Banff National Park, designed as a collaborative immersive environment in which two participants were connected simultaneously. Equipped with HMDs, participants were assigned characters within the virtual space—such as the “Crow” or the “Spider.” The work has been described as “a stage where narrative emerges through collaborative experience incorporating improvisational theatrical elements within the environment.” A central feature was the so-called “Voicemarks,” a mechanism that allowed spoken utterances to be inscribed into the environment as traces that others could later hear. The creators described this as “a persistent aural trace left in the virtual landscape.” In other words, speech accumulated as a kind of “record” of the environment, layering onto others’ experiences and generating new narratives. Contemporary documentation notes that participants physically mimicked actions such as “flying” or “crawling,” while simultaneously leaving behind their voices to intervene in the experiences of others (Laurel et al., 1994). Grau (2003) cited Placeholder as one of the key early examples of VR, a discussion that can be interpreted as extending VR beyond a passive medium for content consumption toward one that fosters narrative and collaborative creation through communication. From this perspective, Placeholder can be seen as demonstrating VR’s potential to serve as a vessel for realizing sociality within the artistic environment.
Osmose (1995, Char Davies)
Char Davies’s Osmose was first presented in 1995 at the Muse´e d’art contemporain de Montre´al as an immersive VR experience (FondationLanglois, 2000). Davies herself remarked that “breath and balance are the most fundamental rhythms of human being, and by using them as an interface, my intention was to transform immersion into a meditative experience” (Davies, 1998, as cited in Grau, 2003). Participants wore an HMD: inhaling caused upward movement, exhaling produced descent, and the tilt of the body controlled horizontal navigation. The environment was composed of multiple layers—“forest, pond, meadow, sky, underwater, subterranean world, abstract flows of light, and layers of code and text”—through which viewers floated, passing through one layer into another (Davies, 1995). As Davies herself noted, “vision here is experienced as flux and permeability rather than fixed objecthood” (Davies, 1998: 150); vision was not a matter of fixed objects but of flux, fluctuation, and transformation.
Grau (2003) analyzed Osmose as a structure juxtaposing natural imagery (forest, water, trees) with artificial elements such as code and text. He argued that this juxtaposition generated an experience that exceeded mere visual immersion, fostering a reorganization of both body and consciousness. This can also be interpreted as an experience marked by friction between natural metaphors and coded artificiality. Crucially, the images of forests or underwater worlds are grounded in computationally generated numerical data. This contradiction, in turn, produces for the viewer a sensation of drifting along the boundary between the real and the virtual.
Moreover, the work’s distinctiveness becomes especially clear in comparison with David Rokeby’s contemporary piece Very Nervous System. Rokeby’s installation detected external bodily movements via sensors and translated them into sound, whereas Osmose transformed “internal rhythms”—such as breathing and balance—into the generative principles of the environment.
The significance of Osmose does not lie merely in the novelty of its input method—breath and balance. Whereas Rokeby’s Very Nervous System belonged to a genealogy of “mirror-like media” that captured external bodily movements, converted them into signals, and reflected them back into the environment (Rokeby, 1995), Osmose employed physiological rhythms as mediators, making the very ontological conditions of the spectator the generative principle of immersion.
Moreover, this shift represents a rupture from the historical trajectory in which cinema and interactive art recorded and reflected externalized bodily expression, repositioning VR within a distinct expressive history as an “aesthetics of internal bodily processes.” In this light, VR’s distinctiveness is understood not as a mere technical differentiation, but as a principle that reorganizes the very relationship between body and medium. It suggests the possibility of mediating even the inner life of the human being. Here, then, lies the historical significance of VR: the formation of a unique genealogy distinct from that of prior interactive media.
Frictional trajectories in contemporary VR art
The questions posed by the early works of the 1990s have been carried forward in diverse ways within recent VR art. The four representative works discussed below each develop “convergence friction” through different methods. In doing so, they re-enact the inquiries articulated by early works in new contexts, while simultaneously making visible the distinctiveness of VR.
Notes on Blindness (2016, Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton & James Spinney) deliberately withholds visual information, constructing an experience grounded in limitation through darkness and pixelated abstraction, allowing participants to relive the cognitive and emotional dimensions of blindness. Yet the aim of this work is not to replicate blindness itself. As Buckmaster (2025) describes it, the piece presents a way of “perceiving perception itself differently.” It stages a friction between the absence of vision and the expansion of sound. Rather than compensating for the lack of imagery, it immersively enables cognitive and emotional experiences that arise precisely through absence, thereby demonstrating VR as a “medium that resources bodily absence.” This inverts what Osmose achieved by transforming an internal bodily rhythm—breath—into a poetic principle of VR immersion, showing how the “aesthetics of internal bodily processes” continues to sustain friction.
Carne y Arena (2017, Alejandro G. Iñárritu) places spectators barefoot in a sand-covered space, where they don VR headsets and are immersed in the arrest of migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border. As Bradshaw (2017) reports, the experience unmistakably conveys “what it feels like to have a gun pointed at you.” What emerges here is a friction between the real body and its audiovisual re-enactment. In this sense, the work extends the lineage of EVE, which presented environments on an architectural scale, yet it develops “convergence friction” by linking bodily immersion to social and political contexts, thereby expanding the critical potential unique to VR.
Chalkroom (2018, Anderson and Huang) begins as the viewer dons a VR headset and feels themselves lift into the experience. Passing through a succession of unfolding rooms like tunnels, one finds Anderson’s words inscribed on the walls. Drawn lines come to life, eventually transforming into galaxies, while Anderson’s voice fills the participant’s mind with narrative (New York Times, 2018; as cited in Anderson and Huang, 2018). Here, traces inscribed as text—namely, the recording quality of language and the spatial improvisation of the environment—coexist in a manner distinct from reality. This structure inherits the experiment of Placeholder (1994), where participants left traces of their own voices in space to form narrative. Yet by shifting the locus of inscription from spectator to artist—from voice-as-spectator to word-as-artist—the work foregrounds a new instance of “convergence friction.”
To extend this comparison, the authors’ recent work AI History 1890–2090 (2023, Hase and Yazaki) will be taken as a case study. In this piece, spectators wearing HMDs are guided into a museum-like space where they are presented with a history of AI authored by AI itself. Here, the task of reconstructing history is delegated to AI, which composes imagined events spanning from 1890 to 2090 as if they were “museum displays.” By juxtaposing the archival format—one that fabricates a sense of neutrality—with AI-generated predictive and fictional images, the work situates viewers in a state of unstable recognition: is this history, or is it generative simulation? In this way, the piece treats the increasingly ubiquitous presence of AI as material for producing “convergence friction,” exposing generative fiction and institutional credibility simultaneously.
Taken together, these four works expose distinct forms of friction—absence of sensation, tension between the real body and representational imagery, the spatialization of language, and the instability of credibility. In doing so, they demonstrate that VR does not converge into a unified language; rather, it mobilizes contradiction and imbalance as resources, developing “convergence friction” and driving its capacity for critical creativity.
Convergence never ends
A comparison of early works with contemporary ones reveals that VR has consistently emerged as a site of friction where heterogeneous logics intersect. Why, then, does convergence friction unfold? Here it is useful to draw upon the concept of deep remediation. Whereas many media borrow the styles or surface expressions of their predecessors, VR reorganizes the very logics of sensation and the body. As Hayles argues, the body can be understood as an information-processing circuit through which meaning is generated, and, in VR, the body functions not as an external input device but as a poetic principle that generates the environment itself (Hayles, 1999). The use of breath as input in Osmose exemplifies this: without mediation through external action, internal rhythm alone brought the immersive space into being. To grasp this distinctiveness of VR, it is helpful to reflect on how other media have converged and established unified languages. The following section compares VR with cinema and television in order to clarify these differences.
Cinema and television
Convergence is a historically universal process across media. Within only a few decades after the Lumie`re screenings of 1895, cinema had established the classical narrative. As Gunning (1991) observes, the editing techniques of Griffith and Eisenstein became naturalized for audiences, taking root as the very language of narrative film. The diverse forms of Edison’s early shorts and the “cinema of attractions” were gradually institutionalized after the 1910s, converging into the Classical Hollywood style alongside the rise of the Hollywood industry. Television followed a similar trajectory. In its early years, heterogeneous forms coexisted—such as live theater broadcasts and breaking news. Yet, as Williams (1974) argued, television integrated the immediacy of radio with cinematic visuality, becoming institutionalized into the broadcast mode of “flow,” grounded in advertising slots. With the consolidation of broadcasting networks and sponsorship systems, standardized formats emerged—30- or 60-min dramas, news programs, and the like. Friction was absorbed, and a stable linguistic system was established. In short, traditional media homogenized the frictions of diversity through institutions and markets, and within a relatively short period forged unified expressive systems.
V R
VR has not yet acquired institutionally stabilized languages or formats. Whereas cinema and television absorbed frictions through markets and institutions to establish unified narrative languages or broadcast modes, VR continues to harbor heterogeneous elements—cinematic imagery, game-like interaction, architectural space—side by side. As a result, frictions are not resolved but instead reappear in each work as new structuring principles. Convergence is a universal process across all media, and VR at times seems to exhibit behaviors that follow this universality. Yet what decisively sets it apart is the quality of its convergence. Whereas cinema and television resolved frictions and contradictions to acquire integrated languages, VR, even after several decades, has yet to develop a unified grammar, instead continuing to sustain its frictions. In other words, while VR belongs to the universal process of convergence, it has formed a distinct expressive history precisely by deliberately sustaining an unfinished convergence. Thus, VR embodies a paradoxical state: it participates in convergent movement, yet without tending toward closure. This refusal to form a unified expressive system makes VR at once similar to, and fundamentally different from, other media.
VR’s incompleteness is not a limitation but a resource. Because it has not yet converged, it carries unarticulated margins that invite artists to reinvent the medium anew with each work. At the same time, incompleteness opens VR to the future: it promises a “next language” while never completing it. For this reason, VR, like embers that refuse to die, continually summons the next work. Here lies the true significance of VR—as a site where artistic practice can think the future.
In contrast to cinema and television, VR is distinctive in terms of the quality of its convergence. VR presents a principle that simultaneously reorganizes style and surface expression in ways not found in other media, and this is precisely its decisive difference. The importance of this difference lies in the fact that, whereas cinema and television achieved popular comprehension and industrial dissemination by resolving frictions, VR sustains its frictions, thereby always leaving room for reinterpretation and reconfiguration. Put differently, VR’s incompleteness is a necessary condition for artistic practice, constantly preserving a margin in which environment, collectivity, and embodiment can be reconstituted anew. VR thus possesses a unique cultural and artistic significance as a medium that reopens the languages closed off by the convergence of earlier media. By treating friction as a resource, VR continually unsettles processes of meaning-making. Because of this incompleteness, the spectator is always drawn into the experiment of reassembling something within VR, such that the work functions not as a finished object but as a site of thought. This distinctiveness becomes even clearer when one considers the objects of convergence. Cinema and television used past records or real-time events as their raw material, converging them into unified systems of expression. By contrast, as the works discussed in this essay have shown, VR takes as its material even what has never existed or events yet to come, and presents the frictions that emerge in their convergence as the very substance of expression. For example, AI History 1890–2090 (Hase and Yazaki, 2023) renders visible a form of convergence friction in which AI—whose status as a medium remains uncertain—is itself medialized, referencing not only the past but also the future. While frictions between past and present media may eventually converge, when they involve indeterminate future phenomena, such convergence cannot be completed until those phenomena themselves become part of the past.
This “future-referential” quality can also be connected to more recent debates. Referring to Floridi’s (2014) concept of the “infosphere,” VR does not merely repeat the history of earlier media. Rather, just as information technologies point to an environment in which both humans and nonhumans participate in writing history, VR functions as a device that anticipates a future information environment. What is crucial here is that the convergence friction of VR does not remain confined to contemporary tensions but emerges as a temporal extension that links past and future across the axis of time. In other words, VR both embraces the genealogies of historical media and experiments with the conditions of an infospheric future, sustaining convergence friction precisely through its incompleteness. Thus, VR occupies an indispensable position in art as a medium that refuses the completion of convergence.
From this point, it becomes clear that understanding VR requires a perspective that values the persistence of friction rather than measuring it against standards of integration or completion. The “collaborative immersion” of EVE, the “improvised narrative generation” of Placeholder, the “poetics of bodily rhythm” of Osmose, and the social and linguistic developments of contemporary works are all rich precisely because they lack unifying closure. They gesture toward futures that should not be visible, intimating them like shadows on a cave wall. In this sense, VR reveals its true significance not as a “destination of convergence” but as a space where convergence remains perpetually unfinished. Its aesthetics take shape when VR is read as a state that references even those things not yet mediated, embracing the potential mediality of the present moment as well as possible forms of media yet to come.
By allowing spectators to summon landscapes of Japan or Bali through bodily operation and weave together mutually divergent experiences, Shaw’s EVE anticipated the structure that Benedikt (1992) described as cyberspace: not simply an internal space of the computer, but a kind of social geography negotiated through norms and cultural institutions. On an architectural scale, the installation enabled participants’ bodily actions to reorganize environments dynamically, embodying how virtual space could be constructed through interaction and context.
Salter (2009) stresses that performance is always entangled with technology, and that new sensory modalities emerge from within this relationship. In the performance works he analyzes, such as those of Blast Theory, improvised bodily gestures and digital environments act inseparably upon one another. In a similar way, Placeholder deployed HMDs and vocal traces (Voicemarks) as stage props, supporting participants’ improvised exchanges. The narratives that emerged were not “preprogrammed content” but, in Salter’s terms, situated performances—expressions generated in the immediacy of the encounter. These improvisational interactions can be seen as anticipating, from the standpoint of the early 1990s, the forms of media that would later emerge in SNS-based environments such as VRChat. Hayles’s (1999) posthuman theory conceives of the body not as a natural entity opposed to technology, but as a process entangled with flows of information and materiality. In this view, the body operates as a circuit in which information and matter continually interact. The use of breath and balance as inputs in Osmose concretized this perspective: breathing rhythms functioned both as physiological processes and as data signals that lifted the environment, enabling the spectator to construct the world as an informationalized body. Immersion here was a literal enactment of Hayles’s idea of a body circulating between matter and information, demonstrating that VR is not merely a visual apparatus but an ontological experiment.
Floridi’s (2014) notion of the “infosphere” refers to an informational environment in which humans and nonhumans coexist. This essay critically extends that concept and applies it to VR, reading VR as a device that simultaneously encompasses both past and future—an experimental arena that sustains convergence friction temporally. In this sense, VR is a medium that incorporates historical genealogies while also anticipating the future infosphere, thereby extending “convergence friction” along the axis of time. From this perspective, VR belongs to the chain of remediation, yet occupies a unique position in media history as an entity that continually disrupts that logic by leaving it perpetually unfinished.
What the foregoing discussion demonstrates is that VR’s distinctiveness lies in its capacity to sustain convergence in an unfinished state. First, it disrupts the prevailing convergence models in media history, pressing theory itself toward revision. Second, by treating incompleteness as a generative source, it develops an “aesthetics of friction” not found in other media. Third, this very friction anticipates future informational environments and becomes a means of critically reflecting on the present. Thus, to frame VR as a “site of convergence friction” carries significance beyond merely organizing the history of media. It offers a foundation for understanding the present of artistic practice and for critically illuminating the horizons of the future. Current practices such as VRChat, VOMA, and the Museum of Other Realities can also be situated along this trajectory. The artistic significance of VR lies not in settling into stable styles, but in continually sustaining an “unstable site” where heterogeneous logics intersect. VR was not born out of nothing. It is continually reborn, fueled by both past and future. Its form is like a flame rising from its fuel, casting shadows of future possibilities upon us who dwell within the cave.
At the same time, the persistence of convergence friction shows why VR is significant today. Cinema secured stability through studios, and television through the schedules of broadcast. Yet VR continues to drift among unstable institutions and fragile platforms. Its incompleteness is not accidental but a mirror of the mediascape we inhabit. AI composes archives whose credibility is uncertain. The metaverse expands without foundation, endlessly growing yet never settled. Immersive exhibitions remain suspended between spectacle and authenticity. These are not failures of form but signs, reflected through the mirror of VR, that culture itself no longer rests upon stable languages. To speak of VR as convergence friction is therefore to speak of the conditions of media grounded in today’s culture. In this environment, incompleteness is not the exception but has become the rule.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author would like to sincerely thank Professor Koji Shibazaki and Professor Atsuhito Sekiguchi, whose supervision and intellectual guidance during the doctoral research laid the foundation for this article. Their insightful advice and continued encouragement have been invaluable to the development of this work. The author used an AI-based tool for language editing and readability; the author takes full responsibility for the final content of the manuscript.
Ethical considerations
This research does not involve human subjects and therefore does not require ethical approval.
Author contributions
The author conceived the research, conducted the analysis, and wrote the manuscript.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
This research is based on publicly available sources and artworks. All sources are cited in the reference list.
Additional information
This article is derived from research originally conducted as part of the author’s doctoral dissertation, completed at Aichi University of the Arts in 2025. The manuscript has been substantially revised and expanded, with newly integrated theoretical frameworks and previously unpublished analyses.