Hello mercado! I don't have an answer to your question, per se, but I do have more studies and resources that i've looked up and got bookmarked via extensive research (extreme googling and talking to other researchers about it, reddit's got a bit of people that research it on their science subreddits). If you want, I can link you a few of the studies. If you want, however, there's a lot you can find just by using the proper terms when you google. Search on reddit is also good too, because that actually has comments and discussion going on.
I, too, have been combing through journal articles looking for things that apply directly to VR.
I've come to realize that the biggest barrier to the development of commercial virtual reality, a la sword art online, or other media that depicts 'plugging in', are the legal and ethical barriers to the research. The problem is not incentive, but our current laws. Right now, people are allowed to experiment with monkeys in the usa without too much hassle, and there are currently clinical trials to give a bionic limb to paralyzed patients via bci (brain to computer interfaces), but it requires a lot more money than it's worth. If there were reliable research groups in other countries that didn't have the same boundaries, I really think the tech would explode.
I think the potential for this technology, at least in theory, would be tremendous, I just don't know if there are any incentives for this research to produce any real world applications or even the slightest interest by the mainstream VR community on it.
I agree, wholeheartedly! At the very least we learn more about who we are, as humans. The person who has that knowledge is the person that can shape our future.
I have a few links on my ipad (or i'd post them here) for further study. There's also a few articles I got by emailing authors (published studies tell you what the state of the art for the subject really means)
http://sci.rutgers.edu/forum/showthread.php?77721-quot-Smart-quot-Neural-ProsthesisThe first groups to convince, however, are ethics groups and lawmakers. If oculus' full vision really is a matrix-level of immersion, they have these boundaries to jump over first and foremost. For now, though, the headsets are pretty cool.
