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It can be a pretty novel experience- neither VR headsets nor walks through a forest are substitutes for each other. I have access to many many acres of forest,

It can be a pretty novel experience- neither VR headsets nor walks through a forest are substitutes for each other. I have access to many many acres of forest, and am quite familiar with it. For reasons unrelated to this discussion, I am unlikely to see many interesting places in person around the world... Pictures are nice, but will never do them justice. I wouldn't mind being able to take a 3d VR tour of them one bit. Edit: That said, living in VR and never going for a walk through a forest would be utterly dystopian and nightmarish for me. The only thing keeping me from daily walks in the woods right now is hunting season.

netcan 5y ago
Agreed. I don't think any of these things are substitutes for each other. A book about the arctic is not an alternative to a visit. It's a substitute for another book, maybe. The main way VFR competes with other stuff is competition for time, in the sense that TV, social media and such are.
smaryjerry 5y ago
In my mind the primary issue is the lack of quality of replication. VR tech is fine, but the quality is just not there. iPhones had a screen quality where you could barely tell there were pixels and eventually got to a high enough quality where no matter how close you looked you couldn’t see the pixels. That is the level of detail needed for VR to be get truly beautiful and our screens and processing power are simply decades away from them, let alone the quality of sound and the other senses.