The Breathless Rhetoric (and Prosaic Economics) of Virtual Reality

Walking through the annual South by Southwest Interactive festival earlier this month, in Austin, you got the sense that one segment of the ever-optimistic U.S. tech industry was feeling particularly sunny. With Facebook just weeks away from launching the long-awaited consumer version of the Oculus Rift, which came out this Monday, virtual reality was clearly the belle of the ball. There were demonstrations everywhere, involving the usual suspects (Samsung, Google, cyber-pornographers) and a host of other brands. Budweiser offered V.R. tours of a brewery. McDonald’s allowed guests to paint the inside of a virtual Happy Meal box. Beneath a thirty-foot-tall inflatable rocket, NASA was using the Rift to take virtual tourists to the top of its Space Launch System, the HTC Vive to show them the International Space Station and the moon, and Google Cardboard to get them to Mars.