Will VR headsets be enough for Team Europe versus real life?

I was deeply impressed. If you could get convincingly run over by a train in your own kitchen, the future of entertainment had clearly arrived.

I haven’t used one since. Which may be slack of me. But not many of us do. In 2024, just 8% of adults in the UK owned a VR headset, which, my research indicates, is roughly the same as the number of people who can play two or more musical instruments.

True, as recently as 2022 there was a 31% increase in insurance claims for VR-related injuries and the Reddit forum “From VR to ER” enjoyed a good run. But those numbers were presumably coming from a low base. Certainly you don’t seem to hear so many tales these days of people splintering lampshades while trying to outsmart a gorilla in an abandoned jungle village.

VR is proving a slow sell. Perhaps it’s the cost. Perhaps it’s the motion sickness. Perhaps it’s the thin ­content: the novelty wears off quickly. If you’ve been run over by one train, you’ve been run over by them all.

Also, maybe the world is turning out to be quite immersive enough, thank you, especially the news media. Why, just this week, the sight of Donald Trump, under lowering skies at Windsor Castle, being loaded into a kind of gilt horsebox alongside King Charles and taken for a slow spin around the greenhouse.

I mean, what could Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord or even Asgard’s Wrath 2 really show us to compare with that?

Where VR is still winning, though, is as a training tool. Astronauts swear by it. Formula One drivers are big VR users.

And so, we now learn, are Europe’s Ryder Cup golfers, each of them issued with a headset by captain Luke Donald so they can familiarise themselves, not just with the contours of the upcoming course at Bethpage, but also with the dull verbal abuse and blundering attempts at distraction which a Ryder Cup and American golf crowd in the US can be relied upon to provide.

“They said, ‘How far do you want this to go?’” Rory McIlroy revealed last week. ‘And I said, ‘Go as far as you want.’” No further details were forthcoming, but we like to imagine the team choosing from a range of bespoke in-play options, starting with the “Light Bantz” package (the usual asinine “Get in the sand” stuff) and heading, via the more inflammatory and personally directed “Hazeltine 2016” setting, all the way up to the “Full Colin Montgomerie”.

I don’t know whether VR ­haptics are sophisticated enough now to replicate the effect of being spat at – the experience of the European entourage at Brookline in 1999 – but I suppose you could have an assistant standing by with a water-spray while you trained for this eventuality.

Personally I would be in favour of a feature which enables the player to sortie sideways wielding an eight iron in the style of the popular “hack and slash” games, but I concede that that’s probably not quite what Donald is hoping to achieve here for Team Europe.

Discussing these arrangements, McIlroy added the caveat: “Nothing can really prepare you.” That’s not true, though, clearly. For a long time people said the same about the penalty shootouts in football, and the argument was always illogical – as if Neil Armstrong had said after his 1969 Apollo mission: “Well, I didn’t train, obviously, because nothing can prepare you for the pressure of that moment when you walk on the moon.”

In sport, something can prepare you, always. You just have to be imaginative enough. Hats off to Donald, then. And VR headsets on.

A few self-lacerating hours under a Meta Quest 3S and by the time Team Europe tee off at Bethpage State Park on Long Island, New York, it will seem as tame as… I don’t know: a carriage ride through the regal Windsor Great Park, maybe.

Photograph by Rui Vieira/PA Images