VR is a Thing

But is it a good thing?

It isn't extraordinarily expensive either. Take I am Cardboard http://www.imcardboard.com/Blog/. If you have an Android smartphone you can have Virtual Reality (VR) Goggles for about $20.

Ask just about anyone who owns a smartphone and they will admit that they have been distracted from a real-world interpersonal interaction by their device. Often the distractions aren't even that important. A text from a friend asking a banal question or a social media post with a cat video is not, for most of us, important enough to ignore a friend. Sure, sometimes we might check just to decide whether or not something is important enough to pry us away from another interaction, and sometimes we might use an alert as an excuse to end a less than interesting conversation, but mostly it's just hard to ignore the insistent interruption that is a smartphone alert. VR takes that a step further and actually places the user in an alternate reality. Netflix plans to release an app that will let you watch shows and movies in a virtual theater, so you don't have to sit in your boring living room with other presumably boring humans. Gaming, for all of its shortfalls still has the potential to be a social experience with groups of friends playing together in the same room. VR goggles, however, will make the fact that you are in the same room with other humans irrelevant. It won't matter that they are there because you will be wearing goggles and headphones that will make it impossible to interact with them outside of the virtual world.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/will-virtual-reality-be-more-than-a-solo-experience/

This inevitability has been explored in a variety of movies and TV shows, but one that sticks out in my mind is Surrogates. This 2009 movie explored a world where many people interacted with the world using a robot that they controlled through a VR interface. The technology already exists. The military and law enforcement use drones and robots to complete tasks that are considered too dangerous for humans. Even home inspectors are using drones instead of ladders to look at rooflines eves, and other hard to reach areas. As long as they don't find anything alarming they can complete their inspection even if they are wary of heights or unable to climb a tall ladder. In a few more years drones and robots may be advanced enough that drones can even give haptic feedback that will essentially allow an operator to touch and feel objects via the drone or robot. The potential for practical and entertainment applications is nearly limitless, but we humans need to learn to live in a world were we use this sort of technology without letting it destroy our ability to maintain real world, interpersonal relationships.