I was pretty excited years ago when the first Oculus Rift came out. I bought one and started developing VR software using Unity. However after a couple of months of development I abandoned the effort. I could no longer endure how every day of development often involved significant time in VR where, according to my inner ear, reality did not correspond to virtual reality, and this resulted in some nausea but mostly just a feeling of being wiped out and drained. Feeling wiped out every day for months is no fun at all. That's when I realized that Apple is probably on to something by focusing on AR rather than VR. In AR, there is no physical conflict with the virtual content.

My intro to RPGs was the commercial text-based multi-player MUD "The Scepter of Goth" in the early 80's, which I still feel was a superior gaming experience. A text-based MUD is to a graphical MMO as a novel is to a movie. Both have merits. But you know how a good book can be much deeper and more involving than its movie? Well I experience the same thing with a good MUD. Engaging your mind directly in the generation of the world is something that's difficult to compete with in silicon and source code.

I recently implemented this exact feature for my employer's image-based backup product for Windows systems. I hesitated to post this, at the risk of sounding like a commercial, but I think it's relevant.

The product itself (ShadowProtect) makes snapshot-based backup images. The relevant feature, called VirtualBoot, can be used to immediately boot a specified backup image within a Sun VirtualBox VM, without the need to restore the backup or to convert it to any other file format (lengthy operations). There are many use cases facilitated by this feature, and data longevity is one of them.

By preserving the applications and operating system, along with the data, the data's lifespan is significantly increased, particularly when data stored in proprietary formats (where the source apps are essential in order to consume the data).