Japan’s Future Imaginaries of Extended Reality
Nicole M. Mueller, Cultural Sociology / Digital Humanities
Imaginaries: Future in the Making

Blended Multimodal Corpora

As emerging technologies tend to rely heavily on ideas directly
derived from Sci-Fi (Liao/Iliadis 2021), large Japanese techcorporations such as Sony and NTT also increasingly collaborate
with Sci-Fi authors. The fact that they even provide short novels
on their websites, outlining the impact of future tech innovation
on Japanese society, further highlights the connection between
narrative fiction and tech-driven future.

The project combines quantitative & qualitative analysis of twotypes of corpora:This connection is analyzed based on the theory of Sociotechnical
Imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2009) or Future Imaginaries (Mager& Katzenbach 2021). Instrumentalized, for instance, by large techcorporations, imaginaries are “collectively held, institutionallystabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures,animated by shared understandings of forms of social life […]attainable through, and supportive of, advances in S&T [scienceand technology]” (Jasanoff 2015: 6). One example for this are
imaginaries related to Extended Reality.

2. Imaginary-focused corpora: More than 10000 XR-related
news articles from the Japanese news website Mogura VR,
dating back until 2015, are analyzed quantitatively.

1. Narrative-focused corpora: 30 XR-related Japanese Sci-Fi
novels such as Fujii Taiyō’s Gene Mapper (2012) are analyzed
qualitatively. Six of these novels (one also written by Fujii) arepart of Sony’s and NTT’s Sci-Fi prototyping initiatives.

The quantitative analysis is based on the Topic Modeling software
Topic Explorer, i.e. an algorithm which identifies thematic clusters
in large text corpora. A multimodal combination with AI-based
image analysis (Baker/Collins 2023) and interviews with Sci-Fiauthors are explored as well.

Left: cover of Fujii Taiyō’s novel ‘Gene Mapper’ ©Hayakawa Design
Right: Topic Explorer user interface (screenshot)
Header illustration of NTT docomo’s XR City website ©NTT docomo

Extended Reality
Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term for technologies which
blend into our perception of physical reality to varying degrees:• Virtual Reality (VR): core technology of the Metaverse,replaces physical reality with a digital simulation• Augmented Reality (AR): adds a virtual layer to physical reality,
accessible via headsets, AR glasses, smartphone apps
→ both still in nascent stage, but more sociological research on VR

Research Questions• Do AR-related imaginaries/narratives (= almost no previousresearch) differ from VR-related ones (= extensive research)?
• How do Sci-Fi novels written in collaboration with large techcorporations differ from those written independently?
• Are there characteristics of XR-related imaginaries or fictional
depictions which are specific to Japan?
• Does the relationship between fictional narratives andnonfictional imaginaries in Japan differ from other countries?
How does fiction shape future? Does it narrate a tech-driven shiny
new world into being? Are problems/challenges also addressed?

References
Topic Explorer: Older versions are accessible via <https://github.com/hinneburg/TopicExplorer> (last access 2024/01).
They have been customized for this project. An updated version of the software is in development.

Video screenshot of Mogura VR’s “Warp & Dive” event ©Mogura Inc.

Baker, P., & Collins, L. (2023): Creating and analysing a multimodal corpus of news texts with Google Cloud Vision’s
automatic image tagger. In: Applied Corpus Linguistics 3, 1-10.
Liao, T., & Iliadis, A. (2021): A future so close: Mapping 10 years of promises and futures across the augmented reality
development cycle. In: new media & society 2021, Vol. 23(2), 258-283.
Jasanoff, S. (2015): Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In: S. Jasanoff, and S. Kim(Eds): Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press, 1–33.
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. (2009): Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States andSouth Korea. In: Minerva 47, 119-146.
Mager, A., & Katzenbach, C. (2021): Future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology: Multiple,contested, commodified. In: new media & society 2021, Vol. 23(2), 223-236.

More about this project