Traveling at the Speed of VR: An Ecocritical Study of Meta’s Pandemic-Era Virtual Reality Travelogues

This article investigates how virtual reality (VR) transforms relationships with place in an era of compounding ecological crises. Analyzing pandemic-era VR titles distributed on Meta Quest and Oculus Rift platforms in 2020–2021, this study employs close textual analysis of popular titles featured across geographic exploration and documentary genres. Analysis reveals the travelogue as a foundational genre for mediating spatial relationships in VR titles featuring photorealistic real-world locations, intensifying the tourist gaze through embodied performance, affective engagement, and proprioceptive adaptation. These experiential qualities culminate in the “VR Overview Effect” (VROE) – an anthropocentric idealization promoting technological transcendence while depoliticizing lived experience. Drawing from theories of resistant spectatorship in cinema and game studies, this article proposes “counter-VR” as a framework of critical praxis for subverting mainstream VR tourism’s technocentric orientation. Through three case studies, this work demonstrates how counter-VR aesthetics and practices enable alternative approaches to virtual travel that center ecocentric values over technocentric paradigms.