The rest, not so much: a major benefit of going out is to inhabit somewhere completely different, not to stay in cyberspace.
The trick is to do Augmented Reality -- experience the Real World enhanced with information from Other Places. It makes the Real World a more multifaceted place. And it takes less time to immerse yourself into something when you can apply the aggregate previous knowledge of the world on top of the actual experience. The most obvious example to me is GPS and electronic maps.
That feels close to someone else indicating what I should experience, and to avoiding thinking and planning, and accidentally avoiding serendipity. (One of my favourite concepts and words!)
Do offline research, then experience X for yourself, then do research to find what you missed. And equally, what other people missed.
I argue they're essentially the same; what's being done is shortening the feedback cycle.
VR tends to present what someone else determines is interesting is to an average person, and too often that means profitable for them.
Offline research allows you to pull together multiple disparate sources of information that are relevant to your peculiar (even strange!) interests.
For the furthering of knowledge, there's nothing like aggregating and criticising said knowledge and disseminating it (both before and after critique; what's in the cupboard can't be discussed, so dissemination is essential to critique). This, the Internet and the applications built on the changing circumstances that data flows are available and cheaply so, has made faster.
Agreed, but that isn't VR.
What I do when I travel is to make heavy use of online resources to plan in advance. Then, I have stored information easily carried (one of my favourite tools is a GPS app for Android that is completely offline-capable; it uses OpenStreetMap data that can be freely downloaded) that is the guide book of what I have decided to do. As we travel, we verify and enhance the online resources we use -- the hotels all get reviews that add to data and so on.
I often use Openstreetmap, and have contributed corrections to it that Google continues to screw up. Prime example near me is finally recognising that an 80 year old road exists, but putting it in the wrong place (residents now put house numbers on their back gates!) and giving identifies some house with two different unique <cough> postcodes!
But Openstreetmap (and all the others) doesn't allow you to
browse to find non-commercial interesting things that you didn't realise you might find - i.e. serendipity. As one example, see the difference between an Openstreetmap map and a "paper" map...
But, having the tools available at low cost (thanks to the EU and their telco-whipping policies) makes it possible to do a more fluid information processing. What I described above is "easy" to do on paper too. I've done it, several times. But, I'd rather not, again.
Two examples;
- Day before yesterday, we were zig-zagging around the northern peak of Luxembourg to do three earlier planned things, get from Dortmund to Sedan, shop and fill up diesel in Luxembourg (very cheap!) and pass Bastogne to see the Battle of the Bulge museum. I went through this region with my parents a very snowy Easter in the early 80s and we were amazed at the amount of war memorials; there's one in every village, and not the usual "Aux Morts" we see in France, but a Sherman tank or similar. I had been talking about that with my own family, and on a whim decided to try finding one. Sure, 8 km away from where we were, there was a PaK 43 in a park, with a stone talking about the US 6th armoured division. This took 5 minutes to find online, and enhanced the day.
- Yesterday as we were done with visiting the Main de Massiges outdoor trench museum, youngest son was hungry and specifically wanted pizza. Online, we located a pizzeria in a nearby town, got the directions and drove there. The pizza was excellent! This saved enormous amounts of time, and made for a better experience.
Online
searching is usually better than offline searching. But
browsing enables you to spot things you weren't expecting.
But, to me, neither of those is "true VR". Yes, I expect we could have long discussions about what "true VR" might mean, and wouldn't agree a definition but would agree on relative characteristics.