Right about now Hurricane Harvey has me longing for some escapism.

On August 24th (of 2017) which was my 43rd birthday, I went to San Francisco for a long weekend getaway (made longer when Hurricane Harvey trapped me there) and in looking for something to do I found the "I wanted to do that... just not alone" meetup.com meet up group and attended an event of theirs at The Myriad, a peculiar bar/arcade (pinball machines not Donkey Kong) with many little independent vendors inside, called "Virtual Reality for Cinema, Entertainment and Travel" which was good but disorganized. Like the last VR talk I went to and honestly the one before that too there wasn't anything of a talk to be had. This was just another opportunity to goof off with an HTC Vive. I played a game called "To The Top" which involved climbing walls when it was my turn. It was outstanding in its realism. In falling, in game, with only my eyes being affected, I nonetheless felt a falling sensation in my emersion. Amazing! Before the gameplay got going I was able to chitchat with one of the coordinators, a Jorge Garcia of Exit Reality, and in speaking with him and others (Angie who ran the Exit Reality booth and one of the staff of The Myriad who was surprisingly versed in VR matters) I learned some things I had not known. Exit Reality's immediate business model is based on an assumption that the barrier to entry in the Vive arena, including two sensors on poles to define the active play space, is a little too much for most and getting in the way of adoption and so they have little booths with operators (helpers) that get set up at Exit Reality's clients for a renters fee and the clients then let the public use the booths for free as bait to attend their locales. IMAX is an example of one of the businesses that Exit Reality is in bed with. You can play with Exit Reality booths at both of the IMAX movie theaters in New York. You can also visit The Myriad for this. They have a consistent Exit Reality booth, operator and all, to allow you to become addicted to Vive. We all have to get hooked if this gimmick is to be for the masses and not just a fringe thing and there are some challenges with that. Supposedly a full-fledged, more-than-a-demo game is coming out within the year, a version of Fallout 4 called Fallout 4 VR. Perhaps this is the bellwether to be, make or break, for if this all will be embraced and game companies will find the platform worth indulging based on game sales. It's bad if Fallout 4 VR fails. Another interesting thing that might come to be are tracking devices that an individual might just wear on his person that emit electromagnetic signals and do away with the need for the two sensors on poles. In the Samsung Gear VR approach, the view for the headset is the screen of a smartphone. When I asked how a phone can possibly line up with someone's eyes given that different people have different distances between their eyes it was explained to me that the phones that are Gear-friendly give a consistent display and that the headset itself then augments that display and allows for some tweaking and adjustment of how you see it. New versions of various phone platforms should, to stay current, be Gear-friendly, and this thus has the potential to create an industry standard for screen size across all platforms. If that really happens, it means that VR is not just a craze.