L’esperienza pre-morte come figura dell’immersività tra cinema e realtà virtuale

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in the (mis)use of rhetorical strategies aimed to pass off virtual reality as «the ultimate empathy machine», as Chris Milk dubbed it. By providing a 360° multisensory experience where the traditional spectator of both static and moving images turns into the explorer and, in a way, even the producer of a digital environment, immersive virtual realities would offer everything that cinema cannot. Yet, in spite of this narrative which is often exploited as a form of propaganda, the close link between cinema and virtual reality continues to play a crucial role in the contemporary iconoscape, and in some cases can be conceived of as a veritable remediation. After analysing the main issues around which the debate on the relationship between the two media revolves, this article focuses on the particular case study of so-called out-of-body (and, more specifically, near-death) experiences. A description is given of the different ways in which cinema and virtual reality make these experiences visible, with special attention to how traditional first-person perspective has been remediated through virtual reality in order to give the experiencer the impression that she is perceiving herself from a location outside her physical body.