Oh, absolutely - we already get put into our own private bubbles. Games..or, at least,
good games do that even if they are fairly low tech.
The rest of the world just fades away and we end up in whatever random game world we want. Our brain filters more and more out of reality for us.
VR helps that transition a bit, but we are happy as a species to give up one reality for another.
But its not a social thing - its a gamer thing. In order to get more and more people in the virtual worlds, you gota turn them into gamers first. But, well, that happens naturally anyway. People will always play games to greater or lesser amounts but the generations that have people that "don't play games" will fade away till they are as rare as people that "don't watch movies" or "dont read".
So eventually spending time, perhaps unhealthy amounts, in VR will be very likely. Going further - it might even become
necessity. "the matrix" is crazy as an energy generation scenario, but makes sense as a
minimal consumption of energy while keeping the most people alive. If resources become bad enough, or if we ever take up deep space travel, total VR becomes the only way to survive sanely.
Hell, maybe in a trillion years, maybe if humanity survives somehow, and we are facing the heat death of the universe, we are all just floating in our own computer systems, waiting for stray energy to hit us and run our simulation for a split second and give us the illusion of a continuous nicer reality. Maybe this is already going on
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But, anyway, for the near future my preference is AR. The real world reskinned, and made a darn site more interesting, is an acceptable compromise without the, say, muscle degradation followed by death of total VR addiction
*goes check that movie*
