According to Oliver Grau, the illusion space with interaction can be experienced differently depending on the psychological distance between the observer and the image space. There are many external factors that create that psychological distance, but the most dominant factor is what medium the space was created through. Analyze how the psychological distance is similar to or different from in the experience of paintings, sculptures, plays, movies, television, games, or VR. In addition, describe how those experiences differ in terms of immersion and critical reflection.
When viewing a painting, the audience needs imagination to create the sense of “immersion” and space, for the medium is at it’s core 2D and the depth dimension created by the artist a skillful illusion. No matter how good the illusion first appear, there comes a time when such illusion is perceived and the boundary of reality and the created image realized. Such process doesn’t necessarily ruin the experience, however, as pointed out by Grau, it is often the moment of realization that inspires most joy. Sculptures supersede the constraint of dimension and do create a real space for audience to step into. However, restricted by their size and immobility, the sense of immersion is limited — in a sense, it is like a world frozen in time, forever showing the second that is now. Plays show the moving of time, and have vivid characters, and in my opinion can be more immersive than any medium mentioned above. The only downside is that the audience in most cases cannot interact freely with the environment and characters as in real life (although there are some modern plays that venture into a new form of performance that do allow certain interaction with improvisation from the actors). Good VR games provide both an immersive 3D environment and a interactive storyline which takes place in a fraction of time. It is in this sense a combination of all technologies above.
However, there are certain suspects that VR lack in comparison to the more traditional art forms. For example, the resolution of most VR games nowadays are not as refined as Renaissance paintings, and many scenes less detailed and rich. The characters in VR are not as nature or realistic compared to those in most plays and textures and reliability worse than sculptures. In the best case VR fulfills 2 of the 5 major senses: vision and sound, yet still lack taste, touch and smell. But there is still great progress to see, and maybe these gaps would be filled someday to see a completed “virtual reality” created by technologies.