How different is virtual reality from dreaming?

Expanding on yesterday’s blog post (“What Will Be Your Spinning Top?”), a primary rationale for trying virtual reality is escapism. The same goes for movies, TV, music, art, vacationing, etc. Escapism is powerful. Escapism is an amazing thing. In realizing so, virtual reality (VR) can take this universal dreamlike pursuit and characteristic of virtually everybody in the world and capitalize on this frequent need and want to explore and immerse ourselves into all sorts of places, real and imagined. It’s not far-fetched to speculate the world we live in today, on planet Earth day-to-day, could become just the ground level of myriad worlds and realities, customized by the individual.

One of the connections made in “What Will Be Your Spinning Top?” was between VR and the movie Inception. While I am in no way predicting a shot-for-shot vision of the film for the evolving technology of VR, I do believe there is an argument to be made that VR will feel more like an indistinguishable dream than a static experience standing in the middle of a Best Buy aisle.

With a headset, of course.

Take a visual ride into what I’m talking about.

Accomplishing something in five minutes that usually takes an hour? Not such a bad reality.

Or dream-like world?

Or reality…?