Philosophical Reflections on Immersive Media in the Metaverse-Centered on immersion and interaction in virtual reality

In this paper, we first examined the development of media from the oral era, through the written and printed media era, to the electronic media era and the current digital media era. In addition, we examined the concepts of image and simulacrum to consider that modern society is an era of simulacrum, which is dominated by image and imitation. Here, we examined the four concepts of image defined by Baudrillard: an image that reflects reality, an image that conceals and degrades reality, an image that conceals the absence of reality, and an image that is completely unrelated to reality or reality. While the image that reflects reality, which can be called the traditional image, is an imitation, the other three images fall into the category of simulacrum. In other words, it is an image that is separated from reality but acquires an autonomous status and goes beyond the stage of original copying, so that the meaning of the body fades and the simulacrum acquires another reality that goes beyond meaning and reality. Virtual reality, also known as VR, has an actuality that belongs to this category of simulacra. We examined the technological genealogy of immersion and interaction to acquire such reality.