The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Mims, a perfect balance of enthusiast and skeptic, has written an excellent article about Virtual Reality, which might be mostly fun and games presently but was intended from the start for more serious things and may soon realize that potential. Mims believes this “transformative experience,” though still in its infancy, is on the immediate horizon, with education particularly in for a reimagining, the Louvre and the living room to become one.

The opening:

Picture this: You walk into a coffee shop or an office, and half the people around you have their eyes hidden behind opaque goggles. Their heads pivot from one made-up thing to the next as they peer into a world invisible to you. They’re in virtual reality.

This might sound like the far future, but I’m here to tell you that it could be our world within five years.

The reasons are simple: Many of us already have a VR-ready device in our pockets. All that’s left is a compelling reason to slip it into the appropriate holder, something that puts it inches from our face, like Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR.

Granted, VR on your smartphone isn’t as compelling as what you can achieve with dedicated, consumer-ready headsets from HTC, Facebook and Sony, which arrive late this year and early next. But the engineers I spoke to—the ones actually building this future—assured me it is only a matter of time before phones catch up.

Meanwhile, all the coverage of the birth of VR is about its applications for games and entertainment. This makes sense, because almost all the early demos are games. But VR is going to be much bigger, much more compelling, and much less trivial than what its earliest adopters have so far envisioned.•