Quote Originally Posted by Komplex
I guess it would still be kind of cool. You would feel totally immersed in what you are doing and your surroundings wouldn't affect your mood.
The answer to that is called "augmented reality", or AR. The idea is to have semi-translucent screens in front of your eyes, with the interface displayed seamlessly over top of your regular vision. Imagine, you're a carpenter doing renovations, and you load the blueprints for the building you're working on into your AR rig, and you can "see" the wiring and plumbing in the walls *before* you make the first cuts...

This would be awesome for studio use - sit in an empty room with a MIDI controller, seeing the keys but having the AR project a huge gothic organ in front of you. Or go more cyberpunk, and have your laptop running, but a full bunch of gear that only you can see, complete with patch cables hanging in mid-air that you could disconnect and reconnect by just gesturing at them. I guess it'd make it harder for the audience to make a connection with the artist...

The display hardware is already out there - the only hurdle is tracking where the HMD *is* exactly - head-tracking in six degrees is not exactly trivial, the only really useful way we know how to do it right now is mechanical (ie, having the HMD physically attached to a boom or something, so you can detect exactly where it's pointed).

<-- went to school for this stuff. :) Yeah. Useful, hey? Lots of want ads for "virtual reality technologist" in the classifieds? Lots of fun, but obsolete before we even graduated.