 The internet has never been as cool or as futuristic as we hoped. We don't just want data, we want to hang out in an actual alternate universe, metaverse, cyberspace, whatever. So now that virtual reality is coming back, people have started wondering again. What would it take to make you really feel like you were in a place, not just looking at it? How could you create an imaginary world as good as the real one? So let's forget about virtual food, surround sound, smell-o-vision. Since the 60s, VR headsets, you know, like the ones in The Lawnmower Man, have been the most popular way to hijack your eyes. When you put something on like the Oculus Rift, you're looking at a flat screen through magnifying glasses, but what you see is a 3D image that fills up almost your entire field of view and moves when your head does. It's pretty bulky right now, but ideally the same thing could be projected onto regular glasses or even straight onto your retina. For touch, you've got all kinds of options, from electrical fields that trick your skin into feeling different textures, to motor-powered gloves that push back on your fingers to make it seem like you're holding something. People have spent a lot of time on just making VR that's not obviously distractingly unrealistic, and it's not clear where you actually can make something that's literally indistinguishable from real life. Fortunately, it doesn't take a perfect imitation to fool your brain. Even if a world doesn't look perfect, if it responds well enough when you move, we can start feeling like we're actually in it. Granted, we still have basically no idea what moving around naturally in virtual space looks like. I mean, do you use a controller? Do you wave your arms? Do you strap yourself into a treadmill or a giant hamster ball? It's easier to create specific situations, like learning how to fly a plane or sitting in a room full of spiders, which is something people can do right now if you want to get over a phobia. If you find a way to manipulate our sense of balance and motion, the way that we manipulate our eyes right now will be a lot closer to our dream of an actual virtual world. So then there's the question of what a populated metaverse would look like. It's easy to see just a cooler version of Second Life and Minecraft, but it could go further than that. If you've ever watched somebody do something dangerous and stupid and kind of awesome on YouTube, imagine becoming them and then streaming your own crazy stunt. Just like the internet hasn't replaced our offline lives, okay, hasn't completely replaced them, the virtual world could end up being a place we go to make the real one better. Or corporations could trap us there while they harvest our organs. Who knows? It's a wide open field.