The depressing reality of the progression of VR

I once had to write a blog post about VR in my first year of 

In my first year of university, I had to write a blog post about VR. If memory serves me correctly it only had to be 250 words, however, as a dyslexic who had chosen CS in part as a degree with few written tasks, I found writing the post challenging.

No one is instructing me to write this post and it will be longer than 250 words. Pushing through dyslexia and all that.

When I wrote that first post I was arguing why VR might be around to stay this time.

I can't remember how I argued the point and I no longer have a copy of the post.

What I want to argue here is that not only is VR here to stay but its progression will allow for a society that we will both choose and to us now seems so dystopian it could only be in sci-fi.

The basis of my premise is that people would love to go play tennis with their friends but play Wii fit instead. Why is this?

Consoles are not cheap, although that is always a relative term.

In today's money, a Wii would cost almost ~£500 which is really expensive and not a small cost for most people.

So why did more people buy a Wii than play tennis?

Tennis is expensive, it comes as a subscription in a way that buying a game or a console are not. For the cost of the Wii which came with Wii sports, you could only have 50 hours of tennis, presuming you already had the racket. https://www.consultancy.uk/news/13695/prices-for-renting-a-tennis-court-vary-considerably-across-the-globe

I think that if you could exist in a VR world, one that could replace where you live, you would both reduce the footprint you presented to the world and increase (from the perspective of preference) your quality of life.

Why are the kids not playing outside?

The world has become more capital intensive. The base rate continues to be at historic lows and that means that there is more money chasing all assets.

This means that if a piece of land isn't being utilised, someone will come and utilise it. If there is a large area of poor terrace houses, that needs to be bulldozed down for flats. If the politics require that you provide housing for the displaced residents (which it often doesn't) then put them in smaller and smaller apartments.

I don't think people will choose to live in VR because they would prefer to live in a virtual world I think they will choose to live in VR because they can't afford not to.

The rich, the super-rich will be able to afford the luxury of visiting places in the real world, doing things in the real world, but by constraining the masses inside boxes while persuading them that they have every choice not to, the rich preserve more of humanities natural endowment for themselves.

Perhaps this all sounds like a conspiracy and I'm claiming the rich are conspiring to bring this about. I don't believe this to be true.

I don't think that the rich won't use VR, I just think that they will be able to choose not to.