By Kim Anh Nguyen
Issy-les-Moulineaux, November 13, 2025
But technology is never neutral. Its value depends on the values of its creators. A platform built for connection can just as easily amplify isolation. A world designed for freedom can just as easily become a refuge from responsibility. The challenge, then, is not to decide whether VR is good or bad, but to design it with conscience. The technology is a mirror. What it reflects will be determined by the people who stand before it.
FROM...
The world begins with light. Not sunlight, but the clean, steady glow of simulated daylight, a brightness that feels familiar yet slightly wrong. Towers of glass shimmer in impossible curves, rivers of color thread through the sky and every surface gleams with a precision the real world never quite achieves. The air has no scent. The wind has no direction. When you reach out to touch something, there’s no resistance, just the ghostly shimmer of a programmed illusion.This is not a dream. It’s a system: a network of sensors, optics and code built to convince your brain that it has stepped elsewhere. For decades, virtual reality was treated as a novelty, an experiment in gaming and escapism. But in recent years, it has evolved into something more profound: a psychological instrument, an artistic medium and a philosophical provocation. Every time someone slips on a headset, they cross a subtle threshold, not just between worlds, but between versions of themselves.
The Science of Presence
To understand why VR feels so real, you have to start with the brain. Reality, as far as neuroscience is concerned, is a negotiation between sensory data and expectation. The brain doesn’t record the world, it predicts it, constantly stitching together fragments of perception into a coherent story of “here.” VR takes advantage of that mechanism. When sight, sound and motion line up with just enough precision, the brain yields. It stops asking questions and accepts the illusion. Researchers call this presence, the visceral sense of being somewhere else.
The ingredients are simple: a frame rate fast enough to fool the eyes, motion tracking fine enough to mirror a turn of the head, and spatial audio that seems to breathe with you. When those cues synchronize, the nervous system commits fully. Step toward the edge of a virtual cliff, and your stomach drops. Your palms sweat. You know you’re safe, your living room carpet underfoot, the hum of a real-world refrigerator somewhere behind you but your body no longer believes it. VR, in essence, exposes a quiet truth: reality is only as strong as our ability to perceive it.
The Mirror of the Mind
The power of virtual reality doesn’t stop at sensory trickery. It reaches deeper into identity itself. In a series of experiments at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, researchers gave participants digital avatars that differed from their real bodies - taller, more athletic, or of another gender. Within minutes, participants unconsciously adapted their posture, confidence and behavior to match the avatars they saw. The phenomenon is known as the embodiment effect - the brain’s willingness to accept a virtual body as its own.
In practice, it’s transformative. Inside VR, people don’t just observe a new perspective; they become it. Teachers use the technology to cultivate empathy, placing students in the position of a refugee or a person facing discrimination. Therapists use it to treat phobias, allowing patients to confront fear in a controlled environment. But the most striking effect isn’t always intentional. When people spend time in virtual spaces, their self-concept often shifts. Someone who feels shy or constrained in the physical world can move with ease and expressiveness in virtual form and those feelings of agency sometimes linger long after the headset comes off.
What VR reveals, then, is not a new identity but a hidden flexibility in the old one. The self, long assumed to be stable, turns out to be negotiable - a narrative the brain can rewrite when given a convincing enough mirror.
The Artist and the Interface
In a small studio in Paris, a motion designer named Kym experienced this revelation firsthand. For years, she’d worked in front of screens, shaping digital movement frame by frame. Her tools were familiar: stylus, keyboard, monitor - a choreography of pixels and patience. Then she tried designing in VR.
The first moment felt disorienting - the scale, the emptiness, the silence. But as she lifted a virtual stylus and began to draw, something shifted. A ribbon of light bloomed before her, suspended in midair. She stepped around it, traced another line, then another, until the air itself seemed to glow with motion. “I wasn’t drawing anymore,” she told me later. “I was sculpting light.” In that instant, design became physical. It was no longer a flat process of manipulating images on a screen, but a full-bodied experience - something between choreography and architecture. To create, she had to move: to bend, step back, look up. She described the process less as technical work than as “a kind of dancing.”
It’s not hyperbole. In virtual reality, the designer becomes performer, the artist becomes inhabitant. Creativity moves off the monitor and into the space around you. It’s no longer about making motion. It is motion.
The Convergence
Across the creative industries, this shift is beginning to blur the boundaries between disciplines. Filmmakers are experimenting with “immersive cinema,” where viewers can walk through a story rather than watch it. Game designers borrow from theater, crafting experiences that respond to a player’s emotion and movement. Architects use VR to build spaces from the inside out, walking through their designs before a single foundation is poured.
The distinctions between art, game, and film are dissolving into a new hybrid form: experience design. What unites these creators is a fascination with presence - not just showing a world, but placing the viewer inside it. Every gesture becomes narrative. Every sound carries weight. Every silence holds potential meaning.
As one artist told me, “The internet was something we looked at. VR is something we stand inside.”
It’s a line that captures both the promise and the strangeness of this new medium.
In virtual reality, participation replaces observation. You are not just consuming a story that you are inhabiting it.
In virtual reality, participation replaces observation. You are not just consuming a story that you are inhabiting it.
The Fragile Line
For all its wonder, VR raises a question that no amount of technical innovation can answer:
If we can replicate every sight and sensation if illusion becomes indistinguishable from trut, what makes the real world special?
Already, developers are creating virtual environments that rival reality in fidelity and beauty. You can stroll through a photorealistic Kyoto, swim with blue whales, or visit a meticulously reconstructed version of ancient Rome. You can even meet a digital facsimile of someone you’ve lost - their voice and expressions modeled from recordings and photographs.
The temptation is obvious. The danger is quieter. When the artificial becomes more comforting than the authentic, when control replaces unpredictability, the edges of experience start to dull. Reality’s imperfections, its friction, its fragility are what give it texture. Without them, the world becomes sterile, a loop of endless gratification without consequence or growth. VR doesn’t erase the real. But it asks whether we’ll still want it.
The Human Test
Perhaps that’s the real experiment unfolding now, not in labs or studios, but in us.
Virtual reality offers the ultimate human fantasy: mastery over perception itself. Yet every breakthrough raises an ethical and emotional cost. If we can choose our environment, our body, even our identity what remains of the unchosen, the accidental, the human?
For some, VR is already a therapeutic tool. Researchers at the University of Oxford use it to treat social anxiety by simulating public spaces. In Los Angeles, developers collaborate with palliative care specialists to help terminal patients “travel” one last time. These uses reveal VR’s nobler side - not escapism, but empathy.
But technology is never neutral. Its value depends on the values of its creators. A platform built for connection can just as easily amplify isolation. A world designed for freedom can just as easily become a refuge from responsibility. The challenge, then, is not to decide whether VR is good or bad, but to design it with conscience. The technology is a mirror. What it reflects will be determined by the people who stand before it.
The Return
Late one evening, Kym removes her headset and blinks against the dim yellow light of her studio. For a moment, the real world feels small; its colors muted, its air still. The wooden desk beneath her fingers feels rougher than she remembered. Outside, traffic hums. Somewhere nearby, someone laughs. She takes a breath. The imperfections of the physical world - the dust, the clutter, the unpredictability, feel almost sacred.
“I love VR,” she says, “but I love this too. The messiness. The gravity of it.” That duality may be the truest insight VR has to offer: we build virtual worlds not to escape life, but to understand it more deeply.
Every illusion reveals the architecture of the mind that made it. Every simulation is a study in longing for control, for beauty, for connection. As the technology advances, headsets will shrink, fidelity will sharpen, and virtual spaces will grow indistinguishable from reality. When that moment arrives, the question will no longer be can we live there?
It will be how will we live here? Because sooner or later, the words will change. We won’t say, “I’m playing VR.” We’ll say, “I’m there.” And when “there” becomes just another version of “here,” we’ll have to decide what reality and humanity truly mean.
It will be how will we live here? Because sooner or later, the words will change. We won’t say, “I’m playing VR.” We’ll say, “I’m there.” And when “there” becomes just another version of “here,” we’ll have to decide what reality and humanity truly mean.