In fact, I would argue that defining “virtual reality” to mean an immersive headset is to miss the point: virtual reality is a digital experience that has fully broken the bounds of human constraints, and in that experience the hardware is a means, not an end. Moreover, a virtual reality experience need not involve vision at all: talking with ChatGPT, for example, is an aural experience that feels more like virtual reality than the majority of experiences I’ve had in a headset.
True virtual reality shifts time like media, place like communications, and, crucially, does so with perfect availability and infinite capacity. In this view, virtual reality is AI, and AI is virtual reality. Hardware does matter — that has been the focus of this Article — but it matters as a means to an end, to enable an interactive experience without the constraints of human capacity or the friction of actual reality.
