Virtual reality

A virtual reality (VR) environment provides a 3d replacement for the visual, auditory, tactile, and other senses. Currently, it is popular with gamers, who use headsets, controllers, and gloves to simulate visual and auditory interactions. Soon, they may use contact-lens-based systems or implanted retinal-imaging devices. With the advent of direct stimulation of nerve pathways using neural implants, or fully immersive holographic environments like holodecks and holosuites, it may move on from gaming to a wider variety of indulgent, scientific, medical, architectural, software engineering, or otherwise intellectual pursuits.

The term virch, in Orion's Arm was previously used for electronic VR as opposed to simulated lifelike experiences. Now, the term's use is blurred as VR can be fully and physically interactive. A vircher is a person who is chronically addicted to VR, and may use virtual drugs which are administered neurally. Virchophobia is the irrational fear of virches or virchers.

Once a vircher enters a VR world, it is referred to as a virchworld which, with sufficient complexity, are regarded as artificial worlds, or cybercosms. As such, a virchuniverse is a large aggregation or collection of many interconnected virchworlds, all sharing the same ontology and lay-out to make intervirchal travel easy. Virchuniverses are regarded as artificial universes. The sum of all VR worlds, AR worlds, and the Internet, is sometimes called the Metaverse.

Virchers living in virchuniverses may also be software, brain uploads, or AI sims (simulations with various levels of sapience). Together with the biological virchers, they make a complex environment that mimics real-life and the distinction can often be blurred or invisible, creating second lives for those unhappy with real life.

Compared with Real Life (RL) and Augmented Reality (AR), VR is cut off from reality.

Simulated reality (SR) is reality simulated by advanced (quantum) computers and generally indistinguishable from "true" reality especially from inhabitants that may or may not know or suspect that they live inside a simulation. VR in comparison is easily distinguished from reality.

A dream or one's subconscious can be considered a virtual world. With neural implants a dream can actually manifest into a virchworld and with linked holographic projectors can be viewed and recorded.

Astronomer Paul Davies once noted: ''“Eventually, entire virtual worlds will be created inside computers, their conscious inhabitants unaware that they are the simulated products of somebody else’s technology. For every original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds—some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of their own, and so on ad infinitum.”''

Examples of VR:
 * Obsidian Platinum in Supergirl used lenses that enabled the users to enter VR, though this was secretly a plot by a criminal organization to trap them inside
 * Cyberpunk's Braindance is immersive VR where the user ‘jacks in’ cybernetically to a headset. It puts them into a coma-like state, where they will relive a sequence recorded from someone else’s memories.
 * Ready Player One is about a VR entertainment universe in 2045 known as the OASIS
 * The Matrix is a vast SR created by artificially intelligent machines.
 * Inception is about a thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious. He creates artificial thoughts that are so realistic that once they are implanted in a person's mind, the person thinks these are his own thoughts.
 * The Lawnmower Man is about a research scientist who uses VR to jumpstart the mental and physical development of his mentally handicapped gardener.
 * Tron is about a hacker sucked into a VR and tries to escape with the help of Tron, a computer program within that VR.
 * Orion's Arm contains 'virches' and 'virchworlds'