Valentine cards represent love, affection, and friendship, but they can also tell us a great deal more.

Driving down Mobile Street in the historic district of downtown Hattiesburg, Mississippi—or cruising it via “street view” in Google Maps—you can see buildings wearing the vestiges of a bygone era.

Hattiesburg Grocery.

Hawkins Hardware.

Bausch & Lomb Hall, home solely to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester, sees few students who aren’t studying physics and astronomy. There’s a good chance some students in the arts and humanities will spend four years at Rochester without ever stepping foot in the building.

Even though I was originally skeptical of how engaging VR was, as I was hitting the virtual tether ball on the VR starter application “First Steps” for 5 minutes straight, I was entranced and fully enjoying myself. Even with the headset feeling a little too tight around my head, the controllers being tied a little too loosely around my wrists, and a little too much outside noise around me, I was immersed in a separate reality, momentarily overlooking my prior knowledge that none of what I was experiencing was real.

Is virtual reality the next step to improving our classrooms?

Inside the Trolley Problem–a VR-based research study that immerses participants in one of moral philosophy’s most famous hypothetical scenarios–I stood in a control room, surrounded by a dark, dismal industrial landscape. Between that and the robotic computer commands, flashing emergency lights, and alarming signals that a train was coming, I found myself a little tense (even with the volume set so low I could barely hear anything over the ambient noise of Studio X).

20 years ago from today, Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrum first proposed the argument that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation”(Bostrum, 1), introducing several topics of intellectual debates, many of which are still ongoing to this day. From technicians in the natural sciences to philosophers and ethicists, multidisciplinary perspectives from esteemed intellectuals can be seen from just a few clicks away from your search bar, thanks to the universalized distribution of the internet.

The robot winks at me, holding out its hand invitingly. After I wipe the sweat off of my hand, I reach for it. The music starts. The robot is counting down. 3, 2,…

With my left hand, I swiftly take out the cassette, and I can see the tables and seats of Studio X again. I stand there dazed, asking myself, “Was I really about to dance with a computer-generated image of a robot?”

In my personal experience, I tend to struggle a lot in my quest to get to the point where I feel completely used to interacting with the people I love through a screen. I can assure you, it would only take a couple of seconds of talking with my friends and family about me to realize that I am a total disaster with my phone. I have this really bad reputation for answering texts a week later (if they’re lucky). In short, I guess we could say that my mind subconsciously seems to have some kind of rejection towards adapting to these technological means of communication.

VR, or virtual reality, is often conducted through the wearing of sensor headsets and hand-held controllers. They form immersive 3D images and experiences that bring users to another world.