Despite the abundance of technologies available today, moving images still tend to be displayed on flat quadrangular screens. Virtual reality, however, is an exception. Indeed, thanks to the Head Mounted Display, it provides a circularization of the image. This paper aims to outline an archaeology of virtual immersive roundness through the prism of a specific metaphor: the bubble. Through the material qualities of the bubble such as transparency, aerial viscosity and elasticity, we can rethink the materiality of virtual reality as well as its historical and symbolic genealogy, from the first hot-air balloons to the inflatable experiments of expanded cinema
