While I’ve read most of the technical articles that Jeremy Bailenson’s lab has published (though from his perch in Xerox PARC, Nick Yee is giving his alma mater a run for its money), I still should read his new book, coauthored with Jim Blascovich. The Los Angeles Times, which runs some of the most disreputable reviews you’ll ever encounter, liked it:

Humanity may be in the process of being transformed by a virtual revolution, but as Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson tell it in their exhilarating book “Infinite Reality,” virtual worlds are as old as human experience, whether one is thinking of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, the Ayahuasca trips of the Amazonian Urarina people or Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” To a large extent, then, the virtual revolution underway is not merely a technological sleight of hand in which digital immersive tools trick the mind into accepting artificial environments as real, but something more profound — the fulfillment of an ancient human impulse. It turns out we have always been, to borrow a phrase, “here to go,” from the “grounded” physical world to the virtual.