And that my friends, is why Virtual Reality will never ever be real, or even look real. I know it's truism, but the sheer realization of that makes me empty and desperate (jk).

Just trying to simulate realism would mean you take an object in your hand in VR, and are able to examine it closely, seeing scratches or others details.

Of course, these details must not be made using procedural generation. That would mean going back to square 1, a superficial world of shallow details. We want details that have a history.

So imagine you're able to find a way to scan these details and reproduce them in VR. You'd have the same problem at a deeper level, say using a magnifier, only revealing the void of your digital life and nothing around has meaning.

Say now you're able to scan details at deeper levels, even at an infinitely deep level. You'd have to store them, and that would probably mean using more storage that they are atoms in this world, so it would be impossible, or would it? Would it be possible to compress details, or vectorize them, so that they'd take less weight that their equivalent?

Another problem would be details for objects that exist only in VR. Here again, these details would need to have a history. That scratch would be here or there and in that shape for a specific reason. That would require a deep understanding of physical laws, and being able to reproduce them at infinitely smaller levels. And store them here again.

So I guess that makes the whole task impossible. I guess it'll never be possible to transfer your soul into VR, and even if it were, you'd become crazy realizing your world is limited, not by the geographical limits you're bound to, but by the depth of details you'd be able to explore.