The theory of assumed existence can be seen in many ways to be a product of photography and later cinema, each of which allows a portion of reality (or more properly its representation) to be stripped out of the temporal present so that the two appear to exist in parallel. As media technologies become more complex and include more of the elements which we typically use to define reality, the notion that they run in parallel with reality rather than being subsumed by it grows stronger. What is perhaps most interesting about the cinematic portrayals of VR and associated parallel realities in films like the Matrix is the way in which cinema and cinematic techniques of representation are always implicitly taken to be the truest embodiment of such realities.