Is virtual reality nearing breakthrough?

Virtual reality has been teasing us. Every year the technology promises a breakthrough that many think could lead to a tipping point, only for the wait to be prolonged and sci-fi movies to reap gains by offering mouth-watering possibilities. This year, however, experts have been more confident than ever, not least because serious business competition is taking place for the first time and Facebook is experimenting with groundbreaking ideas on how people watch videos online.
Big companies like HTC, Sony and Samsung are reportedly planning to launch equipment this year that will make “VR” something on everybody’s lips. The HTC Vive, Sony’s PlayStation VR, Facebook’s Oculus “Rift” and Samsung’s “Rink” headsets are poised to invade worldwide markets very soon, according to the BBC. Much, if not all, will have to do with gaming and entertainment for the time being, but virtual reality will have profound implications on people’s lives once the technology is there for more prospective innovators to access, learn and improve.
Experts say that when the tipping point comes, the sky will be the limit. Imagine working alone at home but having colleagues “nearby”. That, in fact, is an old-fashioned example of what virtual reality can provide. You can play the world’s scariest roller-coaster at home or even “climb” Mt Everest. You can be “in a stadium” to watch a World Cup final. You can “play” with or against Roger Federer. Doctors can adapt virtual reality in treatment and the technology can overhaul the entire medical world just as it revamped the aviation training.
Businesses will be greatly affected, too. Of course, gaming will influence how the VR technology initially goes but the day will come when the likes of TV content producers or psychiatrists embrace  innovations that can benefit their careers. TV content in the future may involve viewers in more ways than we can imagine while treatment of, say, phobias, could make good use of virtual reality. Exercise machines will provide a lot more fun. Facebook can become unrecognisable.
The headsets will be expensive and beyond the reach of most people initially, but so were the first generation of smartphones.
When the production of the headsets reach a tipping point, where devices are placed in the hands of the majority, we could see a big groundswell of previously unimaginable content.
The experts point at how smartphone applications mushroomed – somewhat slowly at first but then ideas seemed to diversify exponentially once the devices were in the hands of the masses – to tell us how virtual reality content can vary in a short period of time. A virtual reality scientist who is familiar with existing devices and their content said recently that five to 10 years from now, “we will be laughing at the quality of what we have now”. Simply put, what is set to wow us this year will become obsolete in a hurry.
In the movie “Surrogates”, headset-wearing human beings live in isolation and interact via remote-control of surrogate robots, who are perfectly good looking, young, healthy and athletic. In an older movie, “Strange Days”, people buy other people’s memories.
Currently, the real world is some way from those scenarios but now nobody can really say they are absolutely impossible. We don’t expect big controversies to arise in the next few years, but people today are having glimpses of the first batches of virtual reality devices that many believe will usher in a new era where the line between what is real and what is not will get significantly thinner.