Think of the Children

The future of virtual reality isn’t just about whether or not it causes a stampede at your local big-box retailer, ends up in bedrooms and living rooms around the world, or enables new artistic achievements—if, in short, VR becomes a mass medium. Let’s get past that and ask: then what? Take a January 2014 article on Forbes’ website titled “Legal Heroin: Is Virtual Reality Our Next Hard Drug.” I assume the authors left out the question mark because they’d already made up their minds.