Totally mainstream.

The history of technology and communication is that the more immersive it is, the more value it offers, and the more the public demands it.

High-end, immersive video games like .. well, like all of today’s top-tier games … make a lot more money than, say, text adventure games. People like to get caught up in things.

Sometimes, the immersion gets in the way — on a smartphone, an old-school game like Tetris can be easier to play than one with a giant immersive world. So we’ve got Angry Birds and Candy Crush, simple, casual games that you can play while waiting in line at the supermarket.

And sometimes the technology just isn’t there yet. Video calling has been available for years now, but still hasn’t really replaced traditional phone calls. It’s still cumbersome to use, there’s no eye contact, you have to brush your hair and pay attention to the person you’re speaking with… But that’s starting to change as the tech gets better.

I think it will take time for VR to get good enough to use outside of particular use cases, like video games and training simulations.

It will need to become pervasive, much easier to use, with a natural interface, high resolution, no lag, no motion sickness.. none of that is there yet. But a lot of progress is being made on all these fronts.

I think that as computers shrink and technology starts to pervade all we do, AR and VR will become the default user interfaces.

Your phone will shrink down so far that there’s no actual thing you’re holding in your hand anymore. It’s built into a ring or earring or contact lens or whatever. And it can generate augmented and virtual reality environments for us without bulky, specialized headsets.

So if you’re having a business meeting, you can have Star Wars-style holograms of the other people there with you, all the way to having the entire room around you disappear and be replaced by the virtual conference space.

You’ll wave your hand, and your entire environment changes around you. That could via IoT devices — the walls change colors on command, or become windows onto virtual (or real) landscapes. Or via holograms and other AR/VR technologies, where the walls don’t actually change color, but it looks to you as if they do.

It’s already coming. My $200 TV takes up a good chunk of my living room space, and anything I’m watching on my phone, I can throw to the TV via Chromecast (or, on the upstairs TV, Roku). Within a couple of years, it will cost $100 and take up the whole wall. A couple of years later, we’ll have smart wall paper.

VR and AR will just be the virtual side of that, and it will be ubiquitous, and easy to use, and our kids will grow up never knowing anything else.