Yes, I’m not fully sold on VR yet either. Perhaps the problem is most VR experiences more or less try to convince you that your real body is in a virtual world,

Yes, I’m not fully sold on VR yet either. Perhaps the problem is most VR experiences more or less try to convince you that your real body is in a virtual world, and this leads to an uncanny sensory valley with today’s tech: the tracking is never quite right, the resolution never high enough, and some NPC will alway manage to break your immersion. So instead of VR, I’ve focused on exploring alternate experiences of reality. And these experiences somehow never feel broken, even when they clearly are. Last fall for example, I brought a pair of oversized eyeballs that wirelessly stream video to a headset to a maker faire. The eyeballs worked great in my apartment but wireless difficulties on site caused latency spikes of over 1 second. Imagine: a full second between you moving one of the eyeballs and your view updating. Horrible. That would never fly for VR but people seemed to love this setup even with the delay. In a way, the delay became part of the new reality that the device presented. And this is what excites me: the possibility of exploring new realities, realities beyond normal human experience. Not just fantasy worlds, but entirely new ways of being and sensing and understanding (the example I keep returning to is synesthesia). Truly being able to realize that vision is a long way out but current tech let’s us get the slightest of glimpses at what this future could hold. And this is what scares me: that the new realities we create will be reflections of us as we are today