Facing oneself : Out-of-body experience, immersion, and the remediation of cinema through virtual reality

Cinema and virtual reality have explored different strategies to visualize so-called out-of-body (and, more precisely, near-death) experiences, where the traditional first-person perspective ends up coinciding, paradoxically enough, with a seemingly disembodied gaze. The observers (in cinema) or users (in immersive virtual environments) get the impression that they are perceiving their own gazeless body, and they therefore feel embodied in a body that is, and at the very same time is not, their own. I maintain that this phenomenon is to be regarded as emblematic of the experience of bilocation that defines presence in virtual environments, thereby arguing against the myth of “total”, “absolute”, or “complete” immersion.