Disturbing.
Unfortunately, you don’t need fancy computers and high tech 5-senses interfaces to get this effect, where your reality is distorted by filters in your head. This is the human condition. We do it all the time.
Here’s an example: a comic book used to manipulate the wetware in kids’ brains to make them think gay people are wicked.
We grow up with these little modules planted in our skulls by well-meaning families and friends who also have them in their heads, and it isn’t a little box mounted on our necks that we can conveniently rip out to perceive “reality”. There ain’t no such thing possible — it’s implicit in the modeling of the world we see around us, because we don’t accurately “see” the world, we build it. Everyone is walking around in a virtual reality all the time, and what matters is how well it reflects an underlying substrate of matter and energy, how well it allows us to interact with our fellow avatars, and how much damage and how much benefit we provide to each other. This is true not just for them, fellow liberal/progressive secular humanists, but for us.
The people who made that anti-gay comic are using a version of virtual reality that creates enemies all around them, and justifies wrecking their lives. It’s also kind of crude and generates a blocky, black & white universe that doesn’t have much nuance or fine detail.
How’s yours doing?