To be devil's advocate it is really practical to develop and roll out digital experiences. You can be a lot more creative about it than the "big tablet" experience you have at McDonald's. Some friends of mine have built experiential art installations that have things like a custom coin-op video game, Pepper's Ghost style displays, a "time machine" experience using video projectors, etc.
I'd love to be able to sell location-based XR experiences to museums: like you go to the paleontology museum and put on a headset and now the museum is a mixed reality Jurassic Park. For that matter I'd love to set up a multiplayer VR park in a big clean span space. There are a lot of difficulties like the cheap headsets don't really have the right tracking capabilities for a seamless location-based experience [1] plus getting together and paying a team which can deliver that sort of thing. A museum with really robust funding could probably afford an XR experience and subsidize development that transfers to other museums but I can't see the economics working for turning an old American Eagle at the mall into a VR experience park: malls have unrealistic ideas about their spaces can earn and most of them have posts in them that player would crash into.
[1] It already knows where it is the instant you put the headset on and it doesn't have to retrain like the MQ3 would.
If our "real world" is screens, maybe. I really hate to think that this is becoming the case, but it is happening and this only hastens it.
The article was about real analogs or actual world objects. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a fantastic example, as is the Field Museum there. Kids are full of screen time already. Is that all there is?
The Museum of Science and Industry and the Field Museum are both well-funded, so they better be held to a high standard :)
They also both host overnights - bring your sleeping bag and pajamas and spend the evening with tons of activities, sleeping among the exhibits, and a morning breakfast. Have done both with my kids :)
https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/events/science...
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/our-events/dozin-with-the-dinos
A significant number of people get motion sickness from VR and thus excluded. If you don't have a problem good for you, but please remember those of us excluded. Please leave some normal no electronics places for those of us who can't enjoy what you do.
Nobody is talking about replacing everything with VR, or anything even close to that.