 For most of my life, virtual reality was the stuff of films like The Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic. It looked pointless or just silly in retrospect. It was also the stuff of books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash. A magical alternate world so ambitious that the most powerful computers today couldn't build it. But virtual reality, it turns out, might be none of those things. The first time I tried the Oculus Rift, it was only a prototype held together by duct tape. I spent a couple of minutes slowly walking around a low-resolution virtual spaceship. The year was 2013 and virtual reality was actually coming. In the following months, people started releasing demos that could only have worked in VR. You could feel vertigo on a steep cliff or have your head cut off with a guillotine. First-person shooters became genuinely first-person. John Carmack, one of the fathers of modern-day video games, left the company he helped found to work on the Rift. At the 2014 Game Developers Conference, virtual reality was vindicated. Sony announced Project Morpheus, its own headset for the PlayStation 4, promising partnerships across the gaming industry. Less than a week later, Facebook, yes Facebook, bought Oculus. But even if Facebook has grand ambitions, the last year has been about finding the limits of virtual reality, including the fact that simply walking around can be literally sickening. At GDC, the Oculus demos were low-key. One of them just put you on a couch. Sony's were slightly more ambitious, but sometimes this only highlighted their shortcomings. My hands kept shooting across the room with the move controller, and when my diving cage started shaking in one demo, it just made me realize that my body couldn't feel a thing. That's where VR is at right now. It can genuinely trick you into thinking you're somewhere else, but disrupting the illusion is easy. That doesn't mean there aren't some fantastic things to do. Eve Valkyrie is a space-fighting simulator that makes you feel like you're really inside a cockpit. Horror games are a natural fit. When something jumps at you, it practically jumps into you. People have created virtual dioramas of places like Jerry Seinfeld's apartment and relaxing virtual vacations like a flight over Iceland. The near-term future of virtual reality looks a lot like these experiments. Developers will figure out what works on present-day headsets, and Sony, Oculus, and Facebook will keep trying to build hardware that raises the bar. The Rift is a black box, and Project Morpheus is an ergonomic Tron headset, but under the shells, they're not so different. Both put you in an immersive world that leans on your brain to fill in the gaps. They're a bit blurry, a bit confining, and in the Rift's case, a bit heavy. Reading anything at all is painful. We still don't really know how to interact with them. Do you use a standard controller? A motion control setup? A giant treadmill? But Facebook and Sony are betting that these are all solvable problems. For now, the Rift and Project Morpheus are still gaming devices, first and foremost. Neither is a consumer product, and Sony says it won't release one until 2015. Oculus hasn't set a date, but it just started selling the second version of its development kit. In the next year, we'll probably see marginal hardware improvements and much bigger software ones. Oculus doesn't want people to have to take off the headset to start a game, and creating a usable interface is a vital step towards making VR practical. Outside Sony and Oculus, a small group of companies are creating experimental Rift controllers, and a competitor is trying to beat the curve by making a mobile headset. All of which takes us to Mark Zuckerberg's huge bet on virtual reality as a platform of the future. One investor even likened it to Google buying Android. Right now, it feels impossible. For now, it probably is. Social interaction in particular is a core part of Facebook's plan, and that's not one of the Rift's strong points. But Facebook is willing to wait a decade for the bet to pay off, and that's enough time for VR to either quietly fade away, quietly replace the internet as we know it, or at least quietly become a new information channel like mobile phones and gaming consoles. The 1990s give us one VR hype cycle, and if we want VR to succeed, we shouldn't buy into another. You're not going to get addicted or forget about sex, and it'll be a long time until you can throw away your keyboard. The better we understand what the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus can and can't do, the better we'll be able to experiment with things they might be able to do, and to create things that people will actually use right now. And most importantly, we'll be able to examine what we want out of virtual reality, and whether Sony and Facebook are the ones to provide it.