As our lab’s research explores shared worlds, we find it useful to look at movies for useful diegetic prototypes. For example, TRON, The Matrix and Ready Player One all tell essentially the same kind of story: People are beamed into an entirely virtual world, where they become completely separate from their actual physical bodies.
In contrast, the Jedi Council in the Star Wars universe tells the opposite story: Members of the Council always remain connected to their actual physical bodies. The people who are beaming in are simply enacting a full-body holographic version of Skype or Google Hangouts.
The essential point is that the Jedi Council does not posit any separate virtual world. The only world that exists is the one people inhabit with their physical bodies. They just happen to have a better version of Skype. I think our own lab’s research is much closer to this vision than it is to the vision within TRON and its descendants.
The Star Trek Holodeck is somewhere in between. There is a suggestion that people in the Holodeck remain attached to their physical bodies, but it is only a suggestion.
A different approach is found in the Visual Instrument and Sight Organ Replacement (VISOR) worn by Geordi La Forge in Star Trek the Next Generation. Geordi inhabits the same physical reality as everyone else, but he perceives that reality quite differently.
It is not entirely certain what Geordi sees when he looks at his fellow crew members. Perhaps he sees them as computer graphic reconstructions of themselves.
But it is clear that he can perceive things that are invisible to others. For example, Geordi can look at a wall and see the electrical wiring within it. I particularly like this diegetic prototype — partly because I suspect that something like it will become a part of our ordinary everyday reality within the next decade or so.