Fantastic fiction has always dabbled in imagining new devices and their power to change our patterns of behaviour. Think about Alice falling into the rabbit hole, Dr Who pulling a lever in the TARDIS or Rick and Morty leaping between dimensions. Stepping through time and space, they all cross the threshold of what Aldous Huxley pinned down as the Doors of Perception, altering the core of their outlook on the world itself. 

New technologies have the power to create new modes of being by enhancing or altering what our bare bodies and minds are capable of. If cartography and navigation created explorers, TV remote controls turned us into zappers and the internet made us all surfers of the hypertext, then what new form of being awaits to be unlocked in the emerging immersive landscape of virtual reality headsets and metaverses? 

We can’t yet be sure what the monopolising dreams of big corporate players will do to the virtual reality landscape, but in its current form, it’s an ever-expanding new frontier luring in early adopters, adventure-seekers, and trailblazers who all restlessly hop between infinite worlds at a speed and level of immersion, never experienced before. 

Virtual Reality opens up a new age of adventure and exploration sparking both the thrill known to those who were once discovering new continents and a burning postcolonial suspicion stemming from the motivations of the powers that stood behind them. Behind every Alan Quartermaine or Indiana Jones, there was an empire, and behind every user-generated world, there are servers and services of Big Tech.

Inviting you on a virtual journey of WORLD HOPPING through a multiverse of VR experiences and worlds that lie beyond anything that you already know, we also want to invite you to help us imagine the ways to prevent this new age of adventure from becoming the new age of digital colonialism.