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“Virtual Reality is already a success as an industrial technology. It just hasn’t hit yet as a communications technology. But it’s become absolutely essential. One of the stories I tell is the story of the oil supply. If we go back twenty or thirty years, most people thought that the oil would be running out about now. And the reason it’s not is because computers allowed people to find and extract oil more efficiently…and from old fields. Ultimately, there’s an illusion — created because of computers — that the oil supply is expanding instead of running out. The underlying reality is that the oil supply is running out, so, in a way, this is a dangerous situation. At any rate, VR was used to visualize oil fields and to visualize machinery to extract oil more efficiently from old fields. Similar things happened in medicine. We understand more about large molecules, we understand more about how the body heals from surgery through VR simulations.”

—	Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality? – RU Sirius Interviews VR Developer Jaron Lanier