Rosedale is also back on the virtual reality scene with the new venture. His company, High Fidelity, wants to build a new avatar world enabled by sensors on phones, computers, and tablets—the goal is to incorporate virtual reality seamlessly into everyday life. His goals go far beyond gaming: He thinks virtual reality technology will eventually become just as ubiquitous as smart phones and laptops.

Even if Rosedale is right, that’s probably a while away. High Fidelity doesn’t have a product even close to being market-ready at this point, although they have done some preliminary experiments with making virtual reality seem more authentic.

At this early stage in the gestation process, though, it’s fascinating to take a closer look at Rosedale’s mission, because it exposes a lot of basic, mind-bending questions. To make virtual reality more real, Rosedale has to have a working theory about what “real” is. And to get backing from firms like Google Ventures (which his company has), Rosedale has to have a persuasive plan for liberating virtual reality from its label of “weird.” The ultimate adoption test—will my mom want to use it?—seems pretty tough to pass in this case: After all, Rosedale is suggesting that people will be okay with dipping in and out of a constructed world where regular rules about time and space and money don’t necessarily apply.

But the question of whether lots of people can learn to love virtual reality is also a wonderful thought experiment, because it forces us to answer this: If reality can be completely recreated with technology, what makes reality so special?

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Like many other new technologies, Rosedale predicts, the rise of virtual reality will come not in a wave, but with a creep—as it becomes more useful, it will start to seem more normal. “We’re working… [to] make virtual reality a lot more accessible and interesting. Work and education are different areas where we could [do that],” he said in an interview.

Although there has been much talk about the big changes to come in education with the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and digital training programs, these technologies are missing an essential component, Rosedale says: They don’t give students the full experience of face-to-face instruction.

“My own prediction is that what we’re doing with High Fidelity will have its first uses in experiential education in ways we’ve not seen,” he said. “Unlike Second Life, the technology is here today to do… things we weren’t able to do before, and one is to let people talk to each other with their faces and body language – that’s teaching.”

Focusing on a specific area like education makes the adoption question a little simpler: Virtual classrooms wouldn’t be designed as a place to build a whole separate world for yourself, like Second Life. They would be just another tool for people who want access to information. “Education is compelling because it’s an early adopter area. Educators are clever and innovative and they try things,” Rosedale said. Plus, “people that are in far away parts of the world who want access to education have a high motivation to use whatever’s out there.”