Virtual Reality (VR) has been with us for many decades - at least as an idea - but the technology has now come of age

Virtual Reality (VR) has been with us for many decades - at least as an idea - but the technology has now come of age

And it’s not just gamers who are benefiting from the immersive possibilities it offers

Four experts, including Mark Bolas - former tutor of Palmer Luckey, who recently hand-delivered the first VR headset made by his company Oculus Rift - talked to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme about the future of VR

Mark Bolas is a professor at USC School of Cinematic Arts and a researcher at the Institute for Creative Technologies. He has been working in virtual reality since 1988

VR hits on so many levels. It’s a real out-of-body experience, and yet completely grounded in your body

People have always wanted to master their environment, to extend our agency. We want our hands to be able to do more; that’s why we have hammers

VR allows us to go beyond the limitations of physical tools to do anything that can be computed. If you want to create a two-mile high tower made out of toothpicks, you can do it

I did a series of 14 different environments; one where you felt like you were very high and had to look down: that was the first time people found this sense of vertigo within a virtual environment. I did a world where you look up towards the sky and see fireworks exploding; that’s just magical

I wanted to build a tool so people could use it. The best way to do that was to stay away from the consumer market because it really wasn’t ready, and to go after industrial uses

So my company created a viewing system that actually meets the specs of modern VR

Because it had such high resolution, commercial users could use it to solve real problems

Automobile companies used it for car design. Oil and gas industry used it to visualise data to figure out the right place to sink a well

The next step was to make these cheap. Consumer VR up until then had a really narrow field of view; it was like looking through a tube of paper. Peripheral vision is really important for a visceral sense, and that’s what people really react to

To find a way to make it low cost and still retain that field of view, we harnessed the power of mobile phones - the screens, tracking and processing - and we figured out a lens design that was extremely inexpensive

It’s been really fun playing all these years, but there’s something more important now, which is making it a space that allows us to harness our emotions, our desire to connect with people

I’m worried by our current computer interfaces. I watch people walking around like zombies with cell phones in their hands, and I have to manoeuvre a mouse to fill out little boxes on web forms in a horribly frustrating way. I think VR will allow us to transcend this

I don’t worry so much about where VR is going, I worry about where we currently are

Maria Korolov is a technology journalist who has devoted her career to writing about virtual reality

The biggest way [VR is changing the workplace] is training and simulations. If you have to train somebody on a very expensive piece of machinery, you want to do it in a simulator. The Army, for example, has been an extremely early adopter, as has the air force

One recent example was a doctor [who] practised surgery on a tiny baby’s heart. He took scans of the heart, uploaded them to the computer and toured it with this little virtual reality headset, was able to plan out his surgery ahead of time, and saved the baby

In education, the biggest change has been Google Expeditions. Google has been seeding elementary schools with over 100,000 virtual reality headsets and lesson plans. Kids are able to go on a virtual reality field trip to, say, the surface of the moon

Gamers want something visceral. When you’re riding a roller-coaster and you go down a hill, your stomach drops out: even though you know it’s not real, your body reacts as if it’s there. When I showed a shark simulation to people and they screamed, I laughed because, "Ha ha, they’re not real." Then I put it on and the shark came at me and I screamed, because it’s a physical reaction

The adult industry is jumping into this with everything they’ve got because it is so compelling. I have sampled it purely from a reviewer perspective, and it felt like you were in a locker room, and you don’t know where to look because everyone’s naked, and the lights are too bright, and they’re interacting with you. This is going to be big

The way the internet has changed the way we communicate information, virtual reality will change the way we communicate experiences

If I wanted to show you what it’s like to cook a meal, I could invite you to my virtual apartment and take you through a virtual cooking class. If I wanted to experience a walk in the woods with you, I could take you to my favourite virtual woods

It will make the world even smaller than it is now. It will increase the ability of people to telecommute and work together across national boundaries dramatically. It’s definitely going to bring us closer together