3-D and Virtual Reality Technology Needs Development and Promotion

I was watching the Star Wars movie series this weekend on the TNT channel.  In Attack of the Clones, Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi has been given a tip as to the location of a star system in which the inhabitants thrive on creating clone armies...for the highest bidder.  But when he goes to the great star library to discover its identity, he only sees empty space where its coordinates are...someone had surreptitiously deleted its memory from the records.  Then Obi-Wan goes to the Jedi temple where Yoda projects a three-dimensional star map around them.  And once again I was reminded about the lagging state of our virtual reality technology...

We don't live on Flatland, but rather in a three-dimensional, spatial environment...so why do we get all our communications either through one-dimensional language or two-dimensional flat pictures?  I remember as a kid loving to look through the View-Master and experiencing at least a semblance of three-dimensional immersion in what I was seeing...where is the improvement over that during the past fifty-plus years?  Why watch a sports event in only two dimensions when cameras can be set up around the competition from strategic vantage points and coordinate together, giving the virtual viewer a truer, spatial sense of what is really going on?  I go outside and see all these stars in the sky, and there is an illusion of them all being projected, side-by-side, against a black background.  Yet I know that some are relatively close to us while others are hundreds...sometimes thousands...of light-years away.  I would much rather have a three-dimensional star map, like in Star Wars, where I could walk among the star projections and more truly appreciate their spatial relationships with each other.  And why can't cinematic art finally take the plunge into virtual movies instead of those occasional tacky 3-D flicks with the silly glasses...what are they afraid of?

I am currently rereading one of my all-time favorite science fiction novel series: Otherland by Tad Williams.  It vividly paints the picture of a well-developed virtual reality technology a hundred years into the future, and I can't help but feel envy for the fictional characters in it who experience the wonders of alternate realities.  But in decrying the lack of three-dimensional visual technology, I'm also complaining about the lack of that level of general communications about our real world...after all, we're not flatlanders...