https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/artificial-intelligence-digital-people-avatars.html
The Metaverse is an interactive digital playground. If you are essentially interacting with cartoon avatar characters, then you know that you are just temporarily interacting with something in between the environment of a game or a simulation.
However, if you are temporarily mentally merged into something like the MATRIX or the 13th Floor, but without any awareness of the "real world", then that photo-realistic or interactive simulation will be your only frame of reference. Thus, you had better set the VR timer for only 1 or 2 hours. If it's more than a few hours, you might start to get hungry or have to go to the bathroom...
Of course if you have this all taken care of because you are in a full immersion pod, then you are already in your own version of the MATRIX.
In the first Avatar movie, people got to see a depiction of how a person was linked to a modified version of themselves adapted to look like humanoid beings on another planet. You are still you, but you have this full immersion haptic bodysuit, grown to just the right specifications.
How Does the concept of Quantum Leap work? The time traveler temporarily takes over the body of a person in their past. The person's body in the past temporarily becomes a haptic suit for the time traveler. The original version of QL could have made this more easy to understand, but the general premise was there.
If time travel could ever be proven to be possible, would that imply that this world is part of a cosmic interactive recording and projection? IE, a simulation of sorts.
What happens if a dangerous sentient digital character gets out into the real world? That's the premise of the 1995 movie Virtuosity.
"In Los Angeles, Lt. Parker Barnes and John Donovan are testing a virtual reality system that is going to be used for training police officers. The two are tracking down a serial killer named SID 6.7 at a restaurant in virtual reality. SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous, a VR amalgam of the most violent serial killers throughout history) causes Donovan to go into shock, killing him." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuosity#Plot
