It's not often that you get to see the future.  It's also not enough that you get to revisit the scene of a crime (metaphorically speaking), 15 years later.  But that's what i got to do today.  10-15 years ago, I was in graduate school, studying computer graphics, and my advisor was super into this new thing called virtual reality.  It wasn't exactly new, of course, the idea had been around, but we had this cool new hardware.  It cost $20,000, had to be bolted into a giant room in the basement, had these big heavy cables, weighed so much that it made your neck hurt to wear it - but it was real!  Virtually real!  In the academic world, we all thought it was very cool.  I built a tennis game where you could dance around to "hit" the ball back to an invisible tennis partner.  But even for us, the novelty wore off.  The headset worked off of magnetic fields, which meant that as you moved around the room, the concept of "up" kept shifting in a decidedly nauseating way.  We tried to compensate, but it never worked quite right, and none of us could keep the thing on for more than about 5 minutes.

So, yeah, cool, but ahead of its time.

Fast forward to day: I have a new client working on a virtual reality installation for SXSW Interactive, a big conference in Austin.  It's based on this thing called Steam VR and the Unreal Engine, and a piece of hardware called the HTC Vive.  Don't worry, I hadn't heard of any of those things either.  But suffice it to say: this thing is cool.  Badass, even.  I fired up this demo from Google called TiltBrush, and it just blew me away.  It wasn't, really, any different from the things we were tinkering with 10 years ago - and yet in another way it was completely different.  Because it actually worked.  The headset was light enough to feel invisible, the resolution was high enough to make you feel like you were actually there.  Walking around felt so natural that I kept bumping into chairs I couldn't see.  And the "paintbrushes" - kind of like Wii controllers - were perfect and natural.  

So, yeah - VR is still going to be a niche thing for a while, yet - but I don't think it will be too much longer before we all wonder how we ever did without it.