Except you changed your point. You didn’t say that media informs or changes our reality, at least that’s not all you said. You said that cosplayers are an example of people who have gone “Don Quixote” because of the media they consumed, which is completely wrong. Comparing people having fun to completely losing touch with reality is absolute nonsense.

Oh!😂😂😂 lol. That's on me. I haven't read Don Quixote. I thought we were talking about people's tendency to mimic characters and peoples they feel a strong emotional connection to. My bad. I guess I should put that on my reading list.

If ALL media has the potential to change our reality, why are you so focused on VR?

You should absolutely be questioning any media you consume. Not doing so is like taking a glass from a random stranger and gulping it down without question. That being said, let's say you're watching TV and do some really, really rough calculations. Depending on the size of the TV, how far away the tv is, how loud it is, etc, that TV screen is only taking up a small percentage of your sensory bandwidth. Ignoring how detail blurs towards the peripheral, the FOV of an eye is about 120 degrees. So if a tv is 20 feet away from you and lets say 52inches 16:9, the area (I'm just calculating a flat circle rather than a complicated orb which would be even more) of your eye's field of view is going to be approximately 543671 in2 but the surface area of the tv is about 1160 in2 meaning that of your visual bandwidth the tv is only taking up approximately .02%. Short of having an insane sound system, The only two sensory systems of your brain that's going to be engaged by the information coming from that .02% of bandwidth is going to be your sight and auditory senses. The video isn't going to respond to your head movements, and it's not stereoscopic so it doesn't have depth, which in addition to lacking retina resolution (tho UHD is getting there) is how your brain knows it's not looking through a window. In order for that .02% of visual information to make an impact in your mind it has to rely on things like appealing to authority, social proofing, and various storytelling techniques which often leverage cognitive biases. Much of those techniques are ingrained in us through pavlovian association after years of watching TV; that "getting used to it" that keeps us from running away when a train is on TV is also a double edged sword that "automatically" gives certain news stations authority in certain peoples' minds or allows us to enjoy cartoons or whatever without having to remind how the flat images are metaphors for real people, etc...

VR on the other hand doesn't need to rely on those secondary techniques to make an impact, the technology is interacting with your subconscious as if it were real through exploiting the technical limitations of your senses. Through domination of your visual input and blinding out any other competing information (ie the rest of your fov) it essentially takes over 100% of your visual bandwidth, same with your auditory bandwidth if your headphones are good. The addition of head tracking that television lacks, combined with high resolution and increasing refresh rates, allows for the "window confusion" that television does not while doing so without the limit of a border. VR is literally hacking the brain through technological exploitation, the storytelling and psychological techniques that TV or movies require for immersion only increase the ability of VR to make an impact. The only method the brain has to discern reality from VR is through the input of sensory systems we don't yet have under our control, sensory systems that we are racing to build hardware for. Controllers and hand tracking merely increase the areas of the brain VR dominates, haptic feedback likes vests or the Teslasuit give us a taste of the sort of levels of immersion we have to look forward to.

And we use all this technology, all this cognitive domination, to play around in virtual Skinner boxes, "games" that are having impacts on our minds in ways that most people using the tech fully deny. Which again will become even more dangerous as we advance the tech into eye tracking, eeg, and other biometrics that allow vr experience creators (and most assuredly facebook) insight into what that skinner box is doing to the mind experiencing it.