VR Heterotopia: User Imaginaries of Virtual Reality Headsets as Technology for Reaching Utopic Spaces

The re-emerging nature of virtual reality (VR) and recurring waves of hype have made this technology a conduit for imaginations of solving complex social and ecological problems. Recent iterations of VR, such as mobile VR and VR head mounted displays (HMDs) for casual users, have made it evident that the spatial relations of VR are multiple and complex. This article utilizes the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia to explore how spatilities of VR are imagined and practiced as counter-spaces in a digital landscape of smartphones and social media. Focusing on the heterotopia’s ability to provide a space for contesting and inverting the societies within which they exist, I show how VR is constantly juxtaposed against other technologies, digital places, and techno-embodiments in user imaginaries and practices. Through ethnographic materials on domestic VR usage collected in Swedish homes, I found that notions of VR as an “other” or different medium are laden with imaginings of VR technology bringing about a better society—a virtual utopia. These positive futures are paired with and derived from dystopic imaginaries and fictions. Recognizing the necessity to take media imaginaries and their inherent spatiality seriously, through how they are expressed and acted upon in the digital geographies of everyday life, I explore how VR users’ contesting ideas are deployed to make VR a hopeful other in a technological landscape. I conclude that conceptualizations that are slippery, self-contradicting, and do works as tricksters have much to offer digital geographies.