I am now used to the idea that I can have a skylight in my ceiling, even though I am not on the top floor of my apartment building. And I can have a portable chess set that can grow until the board is 10 feet wide.
I can make it snow indoors if I want, and I can draw in the air to create shapes that come to life, like Harold with his Purple Crayon. I can rotate a hypercube in 4D right in the middle of my office, and I can pull the Moon down from the sky right into my bedroom.
These are wondrous experiences, and I was able to create them because I have a Meta Quest 3 and I know how to program in WebXR. But such experiences won’t stay wondrous forever.
Sometime soon, everyone will have magic glasses. And when that happens, things like this will becom an ordinary part of daily life.
And then people won’t understand what the fuss was about. Just as people today don’t understand why a train coming toward you on a movie screen could ever have frightened anyone, or the how sound of a movie actor speaking could ever have seemed magical.
And when that happens, I will miss these early days of wonder.