My first VR experience was at a gaming show in Earl's Court in the early '90s, around the time of the European launch of the 16 bit consoles. The show was absolutely overwhelming to teen me and the VR was incredibly underwhelming. They put a headset on me and a controller in my hands so I could move and fire and the game sort of involved moving up and down stairs to shoot a bolt (no sniggering at the back!) at a pterodactyl, and I'm pretty sure there was a charge too, and a huge queue. The graphics were of the standards of an '80s Dire Staits video. I met Hacksaw Jim Duggan at that show too. Absolute giant of a man.
Then there was a very brief boom of these things in gigantic arcades until everyone realised they were shit and it wasn't worth spending £5 on a game when at most they'd charge you 50p for a game (and most likely 20-30p a credit) in an arcade. The cost of them and the space they took up versus normal arcade cabs was crazy too. I've yet to try modern VR due to the cost of entry, and no-one I know has bought one.
AR I feel is more interesting. Abandoned by Google as are so many of their things that show promise (thanks for the Stadia controllers and refunds, Google, but I'd rather play Baldur's Gate 3 remotely), but I feel that's the ideal thing for AR where you can have a switchable HUD that can tell you things about your environment: identify objects, people, information about them that you can never remember, etc. The processing power for that would be astronomical though, surely? But then you'd probably just need a really fast internet connection and most of the processing could be done remotely.
Would we know we were in a simulation? How do you know you're not in one now? What could convince you either way if you weren't 100% sure that you'd entered that experience? Maybe the entry itself was part of the simulation...?
