There are more and more implications made on virtuality integrated into every day life. Up to the moment the Wii was introduced, game consoles considered entertainment gadgets for children who were great at moving their thumbs; however, the Wii overturned this meaning of virtual reality and adopted a new method of social interaction.
Wii Fit Plus was in UK’s top 10 video games chart this year. Wii Fit worked best when it came to balancing and yoga moves; skateboarding and golf were also seen as fun.
The Wii was almost a window to virtual reality experience.
However, the more up to date version of the experience was commented on by Ian Sample (2010) from the guardian.com. The virtual reality has been used in an experiment to transfer men’s minds into a woman’s body. The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.
In this case, both of those virtual experiences have been developed for positive reasons: social interaction and to stop people being prejudice. However, they could also be argued to having great negative impacts. Gergen (1991) argues that the various social (e.g. work, home, personal) and mediated (e.g., computer, phone, television) environments in which we interact are eroding our sense of self and destroying community attachment and moral development.
One of the main problems with the “out of body experience” is that after having a “virtual perfect body”, it could potentially lead to low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and insignificance, even self-destructive acts.
For us as marketers, a compute-generated experience can be a great way of communicating the emotional side of what a service or a brand is about. This is what making intangible service- tangible is at the end of the day.
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