I found it interesting to consider VR as a conceptual descendant of sorts to ELIZA and other archaic technologies that were not as visually intensive. Although one might not immediately see the nontrivial similarities between a chatbot and an audiovisual framework, both technologies are designed to fool the end user’s perception of reality. In ELIZA’s case, this meant fooling the user into believing ELIZA was human; in the case of VR, this means fooling the user into believing that the virtual world that they are seeing and hearing is real. What made ELIZA so impressive was the fact that despite its eery humanity, its implementation was quite small and simple — even current graphing calculators are able to run the full implementation flawlessly. In a way, this was yet another proof that the human senses are easily fooled.
Likewise, VR headsets are portable and compact; although they are still rather computationally intensive, they can run reasonably well on most consumer-grade computers. Without prior exposure to VR headsets, one might not expect these glorified goggles to already simulate reality so well — and yet they do. In fact, there exist many videos online of people who, while watching a VR roller-coaster ride, have toppled over due to the disorienting incongruence between their “real” and “virtual” spatial perception. Thus, it might not be so far-fetched to call VR an ELIZA for the modern age.