It has been pointed out many times that movies are somewhat like dreams. They contain sudden shifts in time and place, impossible points of view, and a sort of eerily voyeuristic quality in which you feel present yet not present at the same time.
Of course there are many differences between a film and a dream. For one thing, dreams don’t have frames. There is no rectangle around the outside of a dream to delineate its boundaries. When you dream, you are completely inside the dream world. Wherever you look, the dream surrounds you.
Which might be one reason so many people are embracing virtual reality, now that it finally appears to be ready for practical wide-spread deployment. We all dream. As far as we can tell, people always have. Dreaming is one of the deepest traits we share with our fellow humans.
Perhaps the tug of fascination felt by so many toward virtual reality not is not the pull of the new or exotic, but of the deeply familiar.