VR is already here, just expensive. 3D television is as well. Full holographic projection is here. I started in design automation in 1976 LSI was still on the drawing board. At that time a kilobyte ram was big and many IC's consisted of 10's of gates. I'm getting really tired of people that don't understand the inevitabilty of some applications because they happened to be prematurely overhyped. Before a technology becomes cheap enough for mass distribution, it generally is developed and provided to "early adopters." Those early adopters pay top dollar for new and expensive technology, but then that technology follows the "learning curve" inevitably. The price drops exponentially and then it becomes available to the mass market. I will guarantee virtual reality interfaces will be available for a reasonable price within a decade. It is not a matter of guesswork just projecting a learning curve that has been used since the beginning of the IC age. When I was at TI in 1976, I was told the date that an equivalent IBM360(mainframe of the time) would be on a chip--which was like 10 or 15 years in the future and it came true.

With virtual reality interface you can see in any wavelength that the sensors provide. You can overlay controls and other data on top of the interface, etc. Why do combat pilots now basically interact through virtual interfaces both inside and outside the cockpit now? It is because the efficiency of what they are trying to do is enhanced. They can see through fog, have enemy targets and threats overlayed.

You want to compare subjectively the idea that you can be off world like and touch the gritty surface of another world just like you can on our nice environment on earth. The reality is that space suits currently have heavy gloves of which you would feel nothing anyway. Ironically, there has already been a tactile virtual inteface made by force interpretation sensors. You can now "feel" a cell. I would like to see you do that with your hands. But the real kicker is the COST. I'm an engineer and I deal with tradeoffs. You will never touch another world, only a few handfuls of people in our lifetimes can be in that position. So our experience will be a second hand interview of that person. I'd rather have a first hand virtual experience, which I think I will be able to have in my lifetime (and a very good one at that).

You say teleoperation is expensive on earth. Yes, it is and where is it used? It is used when it is either too expensive, too dangerous, or just not practical for a human being to do it. So we have deep sea probes, mars rovers, combat and reconaisance drones, brain surgery interfaces, etc. So now a human can teleoperate the use of laser tweezers to manipulate single cells or plot the path of a rover millions of miles away. Both either impossible or currently or economically infeasible for human beings.

Just like astronauts use robot arms and other tools, virtually reality is just an extension of our own abilty to perceive. Our brain is still behind it. We are still perceiving the environment and making decisions when necessary. If we have as an example a robot capable of simulating human abilities to manipulate objects (artificial arms and hands), as well as provide feedback for that experience then we are fools not to use it when it economically makes sense. There are already many examples of teleoperation.

My dad is 92 and fought in WWII. There was no TV when he was born, no jets, no computers, no microwave ovens, no internet, or wikipedia, or satellites. I have to laugh about those that complain AI isn't all that smart or that AI speech recognition is not perfect. Yes 30 years ago it was thought speech recognition would happen fairly quickly before it was understood how much context and complexity was involved in tasks like speech recognitiion and visual recognition. But incrementally and steadily improvements have been made and now we have good speech recognition software, and the first robot cars. Look how far these things have come and how quickly! And just like evolution once a useful applied ability becomes available no matter how primitive, normally the evolution is very quick to refine and perfect it.

My main point is that we are now in the process of perfecting these technologies, not creating them. And thus the predictable inevitabilty of their reducing costs and increasing abilities. The gaming industry will lead the way with these interfaces for obvious reasons, but they will be applicable to a wide variety of applications. Processing speed is still one of the big hold ups of really good VR (for the common user), but Moore's law is very predicatably going to dominate this application and soon. Computer word processing used to be limited by processing speed, now do you ever worry that your typing will slow your computer down? There is a difference between fusion (never proven to be economically feasible) and teleoperation (many applications in existence and useful). So, the dismissive always 20 years away is lazy catch all thinking that doesn't apply to all projected technology improvement equally.

Sorry for the length, of the post but I just felt like getting some of my thoughts out of my head and into cyber space (unreal the web is less than 20 years old!).