• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.41
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• pp.533-552
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• 2015

The environment of images in VR-based animation is constructed to generate and promote interactivity between the images and the viewer without any physical space like a screen, or a monitor. In this process, the images and the viewer are combined as a complex through the media technology, that is, an interface. And it is far more in the case of the animation consisted of the bio-feedback interface closely connecting with the body of viewer. As a result, the viewer experiences a permeable interaction between ego and images world, namely virtual reality. That is different from the way of seeing and interpreting the images from a distance. So it needs to analyse the perception of viewer in the world of virtual images. This paper examines the complex phenomena of both the VR-based animation and the viewer mediated by the interface in light of Media Aesthetics. Media Aesthetics is effective in analysing the phenomena of VR-based animation, for it is concerned with the perception of viewer mediated by the media technology. The perception in VR-based animation is a full-body immersion, or embodied immersion, and it is different from the contemplative immersion in that it is remediated continuously by the technological apparatus. The viewer as an immersant, especially with a bio-feedback interface, can immediately touch and control the images in VR-based animation. Such an immersion, therefore, is new every single moment. And the world of VR-based animation is ultimately constructed through the viewer's full-body, or embodied immersion crossing between the virtual and the real. So the animation is not interpreted, but embodied. And the meaning of it is constructed and reconstructed by the viewer's embodied immersion as an immersant. Here, a new frame of animation more oriented to the viewer's participation as an full-body immersant can be created.