Taking Virtual Reality for a Test Drive | The New Yorker

Although V.R. has not been as lucrative as entertainment companies had hoped, the medium is used a lot in the military (flight and battlefield simulations), business training... health care (preoperative mapping, virtual cadavers... treat P.T.S.D. and phobias... transformed pornography... Independent creators and developers aren’t making their money back...

it can be hard to focus properly on the stories being told, because it’s so tempting to peer around... Telling a conventional narrative... a hard nut to crack...

I am a JetBlue technician, standing on the runway under an Airbus 320... a store manager being held up at gunpoint...

High Fidelity... a sequel to Second Life—a confederation of communal V.R. spaces, sometimes called a metaverse...

make the experience of remote working more human and less lonely... working in a virtual office... I can walk by people and hear what they’re talking about...

Virtual Human Interaction Lab, at Stanford... how simulated reality can shape our behavior... what happens to you in a V.R. world can ripple through the real world...

I became a black man named Michael Sterling... feel the sting of persistent racism... disturbing stories to read... deeply affecting and painful when they happen to you... Body transfer can also allow you to switch genders; become older or younger...

a few years from now we all have Apple glasses on, Alexa has a body... the way we walk around a room is going to be governed by ghosts no one else can see...

V.R.,... is a tool—not a television—akin to a typewriter, a piano, or a toaster oven.