reality is what holds true beauty.

You know the saying, "You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain?" For instance, your eyes see everything upside down, and your brain flips it around. That sort of thing.

An interesting thought: What and how you experience -- otherwise known as your phenomenal experience -- is already a virtual reality. Your brain is making it all up, imperfectly, through a limited range of sense data of actual reality. And then the brain fools itself into thinking it's not! So you take all of this as given reality when it's not.

Evolutionary explanation goes like the brain has no advantage to showing itself it's own processes. But you can sense it sometimes in a flash, the work happening behind the scenes.

Ever been walking down the street and you pass a weird branch coming out of the chain-link fence, but you only see it in your peripherals? And you think, that's a troll witch. Fight or flight. You swivel to bring the figure into your full vision and your brain, like a series of lightning strikes, goes troll witch, troll, little person trying to touch you, weird branch. Oh, weird branch.

Or, take some LCD.

What I'm saying is this: reality does not hold beauty. The feeling and recognition of beauty is a subjective thing, a brain thing. And the brain can be tricked pretty good.

VR will be an incredibly profound new medium of art/entertainment. The immersive effect of the Occulus Rift is well documented, and immersion, sufficient immersion is the goal because it opens us up emotionally to experiences as given experiences.

Imagine VR moon, you're an astronaut. Look up and see the earth at the exact scale it would actually be at in relation to you. That experience is impossible otherwise. That experience could change your worldview.

And that's the power of VR -- that it unlocks experiences that would otherwise be economically unavailable to you. Oculus Rift is merely the prototype, and the brain can fool itself into believing it's real. But imagine what could be possible twenty, thirty years from now? How would that change our relationship with real world objects or locales? What would be the point of real-world materialism and in effect, the economy?