You&#x27;re confusing realism for presence. Realism is not necessary for presence.<p>I&#x27;m using the conventional notion of realism: that set of coventions, idioms, beliefs, habitual expectation that form your set of what is &quot;real&quot;. This is easy to test -- if you were to go to another country with a very different culture, some things will jar you out of your expectations. Other things like catastrophic natural disasters tends to shock people into paralysis because the thing going through their mind is &quot;this isn&#x27;t real&quot;. You see a tsunami coming your way, it&#x27;s real enough, but because you haven&#x27;t experienced it, you might spent some time wondering if this was &quot;real&quot;.<p>Presence, on the other hand, is the experience of being embodied within a space, whether that space is tangible or not. It is quite possible to have presence within an artificial space whose laws of physics do not resemble anything that you expect. Presence is typically attained when the uncanny valley is crossed. In other words, it&#x27;s the <i>brain</i> that needs convincing for the presence, not your expectations on what &quot;realism&quot; is.<p>If you are finding unrealistic elements are jarring, that&#x27;s more likely that the tech has not crossed the uncanny valley for you. There&#x27;s a strong case that the current generation of VR tech works well for men, but probably not women, due to physiological differences in neurology.<p>However, if the VR experience has presence, but things don&#x27;t operate the way you expect, that leads to a different experience: an existential crises.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to where this is going. Our civilization needs this tech badly, to help break us out of conventionality and closed-mindedness. Some of the most interesting project includes a VR sim of being in a warzone as a bystander ... to develop empathy for people elsewhere. That&#x27;s something the current social networks don&#x27;t foster. We still have difficulty seeing things from someone else&#x27;s point of view.<p>If the world wide web brought information closer together, the mainstream adoption of VR can potentially bring people together. And that&#x27;s a big deal.