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Visit the City of San Leandro website at www.sanleandro.org <br />Navy's research lab to The Amazing Spiderman <br />game. <br />"We're taking these things to the next <br />generation," PhaseSpace CEO Tracy McSheery <br />said. "The key is we're making them affordable." <br />And it is price combined with breakthroughs on <br />nearly every front that make experts believe that <br />immersive virtual technology is about to become <br />mainstream. "Sci-Fi and reality are overlapping," <br />McSheery said. <br />The military is using virtual reality to treat <br />veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress <br />disorder. Architects can test floor plans. <br />Directors can plot films. Wheelchair users can <br />experience themselves mobile or learn to use a <br />prosthetic leg. <br />When PhaseSpace accompanied De La Peña to <br />the Sundance Film Festival last year, an <br />American Indian woman approached them about <br />using immersive virtual reality to teach young <br />people about their culture. <br />"It's a wonderful congruence of technology, <br />software and tools that will allow us to capture <br />what would have been lost," McSheery said. <br />The important thing about virtual reality isn't that <br />people see a dramatic 3-D panorama but that <br />"you yourself change," Jaron Lanier, who coined <br />the phrase virtual reality, said during a 2011 <br />online interview. "You experience yourself in a <br />different way than you ever have before." <br />That may be as a bird, a woman, a man, as <br />anything imaginable. Lanier is experimenting <br />with using exotic avatars that allow students to <br />become the object they are studying -- a <br />molecule, DNA, triangles, animals. <br />The technology is already used with flight <br />simulators, online dating, Nintendo Wii games <br />and Microsoft Kinect, a motion-sensing device <br />that frees people from the motion tracking body <br />suits. The virtual community, Second World, has <br />been around for nearly a decade. <br />Of course, predictions about making virtual <br />reality part of everyday life have been around <br />even longer than Second World. <br />But with the combination of cost, acceptance <br />and technological breakthroughs, "I think we're <br />just about there," said Jeremy Bailenson, who <br />studies the psychological effects of virtual reality <br />at Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. <br />There is room for misuse: creating realities we <br />want without homelessness, hunger or other <br />economic and political realities. Games can be <br />educational or violent. Politicians will be <br />attracted to the technology to sway voters with <br />outright deception. Accounting for misuse is <br />important because, as Bailenson said, virtual <br />reality affects our attitudes, how we behave and <br />our cognition. But the Internet, he said, is one <br />step in the shift to an ever-more virtual world, <br />which may be inevitable given how humans are <br />wired. People already experience the world <br />three dimensionally and know the virtual world is <br />fake, but it feels real. <br />"Both sides of the brain light up," De La Peña <br />said. "People jump all the time in movies."