>>204020Virtual Reality as late as the early 1990s was just a hobby for nerds, with no real commercial value and involving the kind of hardware that now seems hopelessly out-of-date (e.g. sense-o-ramas). VR today, a two-and-half decades later, is a multi-billion dollar industry with probably tens of thousands of highly paid programmers working 9+ hours a day on developing VR and making virtual worlds more realistic.
In my opinion it is the future of video gaming for sure, and I think the current norm for video games (i.e. staring at a screen on which a 3D world is displayed) will seem laughably out-dated within a few decades. There is clearly an appeal to spend prolonged periods away from the "real world" and in a more exciting, fulfilling, entertaining virtual one. Within a few decades consumers will expect each new game to involve the player entering the virtual world of the game and being able to turn their head and explore their surroundings as completely as possible.
Google Maps, since improved by Google Streetview, will I believe be further updated by something akin to Google Explore where you can experience the world as a virtual tourist, walking around the streets of Lisbon with the surroundings existing not merely as 2D facades but somewhat realistic, high-resolution objects reflective of a real-world experience.
The main issue VR faces is how to populate a virtual world with realistic humanoid characters whose behaviour is realistic and whose capacity for dialogue is wider than mere stock phrases or a few alternative sentence options. How I believe this will be solved is with the help of things like novels, plays, field recordings and movies etc, which will be uploaded in their hundreds of thousands and analyzed by artificial intelligence in order to grasp regional dialects, the logic of an average conversation, the evolution of speech etc. All of this, I suspect, will lead to a person being able to inhabit, for example, a Victorian England virtual world for prolonged periods. In this space they will be able to find a job, speak to people, walk around - ideally without any video game-like narrative forcing them down certain behavioral paths.