What Oculus Rift and virtual reality mean for sex, death, violence, and identity

Human recorded history is a few thousand years old, and we still haven’t really figured out things like sex and death. We can do both, but we don’t really understand their full power over us — and it’s all about to get a lot more complicated thanks to virtual reality.

The Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset is coming. Well, it’s already here if you’ve dropped the cash for the developer version, and Oculus VR — which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Facebook — is working on a consumer version. That device should debut later this year or early in 2015, and it will enable people to enter digital landscapes visually. The head-mounted display tracks the wearer’s movement and position and adjusts the 3D screen so that it always feels like you are really looking around the virtual environment. The applications for this are obvious. We’ll use it for gaming. Architects will use it to show their models to clients. Professionals will use it to make remote meetings feel more intimate.