Immersion and interactivity, a dream that began with early cinema

Abstract

The present article explores the relationship between cinema and the production of virtual worlds. Following a historiographical analysis, which takes as a starting point the concepts of “virtuality” and “cultural series”, the following text proposes to analyze the current immersive strategies of the cinematographic medium in relation to the past ones. So that, this historiographical approach leads us to point out the existence of certain pre-digital practices which are based on the search for immersive experiences. The starting hypothesis is that the creation of virtual worlds was already present in the origins of cinema, which was born to expand beyond itself. In this sense, the advance of digital technology has served to promote the development and the creation of these virtual worlds, while it has turned them more complex by altering the relation among the image and its referent. The main goal of this text is to demonstrate that, beyond the technological revolution enabled by the digital’s development, it is essential to understand the implications and the functioning of virtual worlds from the past in order to get to understand the immersive strategies of the virtual worlds from the present.