My virtual reality experiment: I was driving up a 6 lane superhighway early one August afternoon in clear bright sunlight at about 65 miles per hour in my clunky Toyota Corolla DX, with no other cars on the road. I decided to look intently at the little image in the car's rear view mirror -- no high tech apparatus. I really really really really intently focused all my attention on that little image! It was entirely convincing. That "little" image became my whole experienced reality: I was driving where I had been, not where the automobile was going. Fortunately I "snapped out of it" in time to avoid becoming a one car crash in the ditch on the right side of the road. (It was a very good place to have conducted this experiment, because there was a police barracks, a teaching hospital, and both Christian and Jewish cemeteries nearby, just in case.) You may try to repeat my virtual reality experiment at your own risk; I strongly advise you against doing so. I assure you: It worked. (Of course it will not work if you don't "give in to it", just like a video game won't work if you just look at the pixels as what some computer programmer coded up with branching instructions depending on what inputs you enter.) Moral of this story: VIRTUAL REALITY CAN KILL YOU. Forewarned is forearmed.

Part 2. The above story is probably from around 2000. Fast forward to 2022. 1AM and I decide to drive to the office because a Consolidated Edison power failure at home made it impossible to do anything useful. My house is more than a quarter mile from where a tree had fallen on a power line. Pitch black. As I approach the cross road to turn left to go to town, I see a blinding police light ahead. Obviously I was not going forward. No way to turn around anywhere! I had to backup a quarter mile on a narrow 2-lane road with bad things to damage the car on both sides: a ditch, a steel guard rail.... All I had was the car's rear-view video camera and the yellow line in the center of the road (thank God for both those two or else I would have been dead in the water!). 

So now I really did have to drive where my car had been, believing in a little image, this time a small video screen not a small mirror. Long story short, after probably 20 minutes or more of cursing and braking and going forward in reverse gear another 40 feet and having to stop again because I was going off the road again... I finally succeeded in getting back to where I could change course and proceed in the opposite direction seeing the road ahead through the windshield. This too was very believable. I could not coordinate what I was seeing: that authoritative yellow line in the middle of the road in the little tv image, with turning the steering wheel to  keep aligned on it. I had to keep compensating for the car almost going off one side of the road to try to get it back in the middle and try once more at it. One time I was so "lost" and at my wits' end (even though I knew exactly where I was...), that I had to reset and surrender maybe 50 feet and drive forward to be able to try to get back on the line.  While I was in no significant risk of injury or death (hit the brake again!), I was continuously experiencing my arms not being able to do with the steering wheel what I knew in my head should be happening from where saw I needed to go.

Back before computers, there were glasses a person could wear that inverted their visual field. Everything looked upside down. A person wearing these glasses and not taking them off, after a couple days, with the glasses still on, would suddenly start seeing everything right side up again.