Dive Deep: Our Immersive Selves

What happens to our sense of self inside immersive worlds? Dive Deep: Our Immersive Selves presents immersive Virtual Reality (VR) work by students in Virtual Realities led by Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene in the Digital Humanities department at King’s College London. The students respond to the theme of selfhood, exploring how immersive technologies change how we think about our bodies and their relationship to the world around us. Visitors are invited to explore two ‘playable’ environments and a host of walk-through videos created in Unity, a 3D game engine often used to prototype world-building scenarios and communicate speculative ideas. The concept of ‘estrangement’, an aesthetic principle borrowed from theatre and literature and applied as a design technique in VR, inspired some of the works. Estrangement disrupts immersion, prompting users to question what they see and how they see it. This exhibition has been created with students in Curating and Preserving Digital Culture, Digital Humanities department, King’s College London. Their display traces the shifting nature of identity and the currents which shape it throughout our lives.