I had a conversation with one of the graduate students in our CS department. His group does very different research from ours, so like most people, he hasn’t had experience with virtual reality.
He told me that over the holiday break, he went to a friend’s house and tried VR for the first time. The experience was just a simple fighting game with abstract shapes. Yet even that, he reported, gave him a powerful sense of immersion that he had not expected.
He came away a believer. It’s too early in the technology, he said, and I agree with him. But it’s kind of like seeing a movie in the very early days of cinema. You can already see how eventually it will take over.
This student now believes in the future of VR because he experienced it for himself. In particular, he told me that it really required that first-hand experience to make him a believer.
It’s like what John Sebastian once said about music:
I’ll tell you about the magic, and it’ll free your soul
But it’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll