Virtual and augmented reality 2020

With roots going back to Ivan Sutherland's research in the 1960s, virtual reality (VR) reached a plateau in the early 1990s when the promise was demonstrable in universities and research laboratories. Although we all knew we had a long way to go, hype overtook the field, leading to impossible expectations. Fortunately, a few years later the Internet became the latest hot topic, leaving VR researchers free to go back to work. Almost a decade later, VR has gone from "almost there" to "barely there". That's a big step! Perhaps by 2020 we will be "pretty well there"! In this article, I venture a few remarks about progress over the next two decades. However, the safest prediction is that unanticipated science and technology advances will make this forecast seem overly conservative.