The virtual reality worlds, applications and concepts being developed now have been envisioned for over two decades, but only now has technology made them possible, according to Albert ‘Skip’ Rizzo, director of medical virtual reality at the University of Southern California.

Speaking today at the Dutch VR Days event in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Rizzo said that while virtual reality stalled in the mid nineties due to inadequate technology, it is now at the stage where it can become a ubiquitous part of everyday life.

“Essentially now the technology has caught up with the vision from way back,” he said.

Rizzo has been developing VR experiences for medical applications, including physical therapy and PTSD treatment, for decades, and founded a lab dedicated to the field at the University of Southern California in the mid nineties.

“It was just at the start of the time of the nuclear winter for virtual reality, because all the excitement we have in this room about what VR is all about – we had that in the early to mid nineties,” he said.

“VR was going to change the world. Unfortunately, the technology wasn’t there to deliver on that vision.”

Despite this, his early work demonstrated immense potential for VR as a therapy tool, and additional research in later years has only improved this.

“Back in 94, people did a lot of stuff with simple phobias. But the neat thing about working with people with anxiety disorders and phobias and PTSD is that anything that has a whiff of what they’re afraid of, they react to,” he said. “So it didn’t need to be an exact replica in virtual reality for it to have a clinical effect.

“It’s human-computer interaction but on steroids – it allows people to interact in a natural way with computers and extremely complex data.”

Now VR has again risen in popularity, Rizzo believes the time has come for the technology to become ubiquitous.

“You see all the different groups now that are building things and imaginative applications, imaginative displays, imaginative interface devices so we can interact more naturally with the content. We’re seeing an explosion of content,” he said.

“And this takes the old vision of putting people in virtual environments, even though the reality sucked back then, but now we’re seeing things like the Gear being a commodity thing, I predict people are going to have these like they have toasters – everybody’s going to have one.”