Virtual reality experiences:

real or illusory?

Abstract

Virtual reality has become increasingly present, which gives rise to new philosophical questions: what is the nature of virtual reality experiences? Would they be exactly like usual perceptions, or do they have some feature that differentiates them? Are they illusory? We argue that virtual reality experiences should not be treated as illusory, as claimed by most contemporary theorists on the topic, but rather as allusive, conditioned to the incorporation of hardware and practical knowledge involved in the use of technology. To this end, we address their relation with illusions, explore how they relate to our everyday experiences and present our proposal that they can be understood as allusions. We then show that their allusive character does not make them indistinguishable from non-virtual experiences, since the biological and sensorimotor limits of cognition provide the threshold of differentiation, even in cases of augmented reality. In addition, we explore the emergence of augmented reality technology and discuss the possibility of systematically replacing perception with illusory projections. However, to date, there is no empirical evidence to support this possibility. We highlight the importance of the relationship between perception and action in the physical environment and argue that specific errors in virtual experiences do not characterize their state as illusory.