In author Vernor Vinge’s 2006 Hugo Award-winning novel Rainbow’s End, a hospital patient from the early 2000s wakes up Rip Van Winkle-like in the 2030s and finds that much of the world is experienced via augmented reality (AR); wearable computers that transmit information to contact-lens-based visual displays that overlay simulated content on the physical environment. This is how people—especially young people—experience the world, through their own personalized realities.

Sound implausible and far-fetched? No, we didn’t think so either, because it seems like that’s the logical progression of AR and its related technologies.

The idea of combining the “virtual” with the “physical” has been a trope of science-fiction and fantasy for centuries. The first-ever description of what we would today call “augmented reality” was written in 1901 by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels, in a novel called The Master Key. The term “virtual reality” (“la réalité virtuelle”) was first used in 1938 by French playwright Antonin Artaud, although he was using it to describe the illusory world of the theater. In the modern era, movies such as the seminal Tron (1982) and TV shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spinoffs had human (and humanoid) characters immersed in virtual environments often via the Holodeck.