1. Where does virtual reality stand today?

1.1 Why does this dossier look at the conditions for VR applications to flourish?

The aim of this article is to establish that the widespread success of VR, which is still to come, must be based on a number of conditions that are not exclusively technological. For a start, can we say that developing VR applications means selling virtual goods? Markets are never virtual. On the contrary, we believe that the first thing to do is to deconstruct the effects of a media coverage of this field of computing that was too precociously imaginary.

VR is all about enabling a user to experience a sensory and perceptual unification with a virtual environment? And the experience of plunging into the virtual universe is, for that user, completely real. So why do we insist on...