Why VR still isn’t as immersive as it should be

One of my most immersive experiences was set in a forest. Daytime, the sky a clear blue with large white clouds floating over, pine trees stretching up, orange needles covering the ground with a smell of sap. On the ground a man is dying, but preparing for his last action, an ambush to cover the escape of his dear friends, fighters for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The man thinks long about death and eternity and everything he could not do, the horror of finitude. I finish the book and throw it across the room. The experience was too real for me.

Reading a novel, such as Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, is an immersive experience. Never did I think that I was actually Robert Jordan, that I was actually speaking Spanish among Republican guerrillas, nor did I feel exactly what he felt blowing up a bridge, or having a tank shell explode below my horse. But I still know this world, know what it looks like, smells like, feels like. I know many of the characters better than people I’ve met in person, I know the geography of the world, I know what matters and doesn’t matter to each of them. So even if I don’t inhabit the body of Robert Jordan, I do know what it feels like to be him. I know his knowledge, and I think his thoughts.