This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of virtual embodiment in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersants sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar. Emergent immersive practices in an increasingly expanding and cross-disciplinary field are coinciding with a wealth of new scientific knowledge in body-ownership and self-attribution. A growing understanding of the way a body constructs its sense of selfhood is intersecting with the historically persistent desire to make an onto-relational link between the body that knows an experience and bodies that cannot know without occupying their unique point of view. The author argues that the desire to empathize with anothers ineffable bodily experiences is finding new expression in contexts of particular urgency. For example, patients wishing to communicate their complex physical experiences to their extended networks of support in healthcare, orcommunities placing policymakers inside vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised virtual bodies in an attempt to prompt personal change. This book is intended for students, academics and practitioner-researchers studying or working in the related fields of immersive theatre/art-making, arts-science and VR in applied performance practices.

Liam Jarvis is a researcher, theatre maker and Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, UK. Since 2007, he has been co-director of Analogue, whose work has toured the UK and Europe. His research and teaching have focused on immersion, embodiment and contemporary participatory practices in (post)digital culture. He has published numerous book chapters and articles in journals such asPerformance Research and theInternational Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. He is currently co-convener of the Intermediality in Theatre& Performance Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and a board member for Theatre-Rites.

Chapter 1:  Introduction.- Chapter 2: Proto-immersive Discourse& the Theatrical Condition.- Chapter 3: The Immersive Promise of Becoming [with] the Other Body.- Chapter 4: Body-swapping: Self-attribution and Body Transfer Illusions (BTIs).- Chapter 5: Empathy Activism& Bodying Difference in Postdigital Culture: Jane Gauntletts In My Shoes& BeAnotherLabs The Machine to be Another.- Chapter 6: Touching with a Virtualized Hand: Analogues Transports.- Chapter 7: The Suffering Avatar: Vicarity& Resistance in Body-tracked Multi-player Gaming.- Conclusion: The Theft of the Dragon Sabre: Bodies at Risk in Digital Reality.