Creative immersive experiences, across the history of computing, are computationally expensive. The better computing gets, the more (visually at least) immersive the experience. The search for photo realism is an asymptotic search to compute a convincing simulacrum of reality. So much human nature drove the tip of that spear forward.
Immersion itself implies some kind of tricking of the consciousness, blending the familiar with the novel. Instructions and ideas piped into a machine that generates images. GPUs are specialized in parallel computation because that's precisely the architecture that best performs the multi-modal magic trick.
It's surprising to me how incredulous people seem about the possibility of creating a sentient machine that is fed off a large enough diet of human written material. Language is crystalized consciousness. It's the primary medium we use to communicate our inner experience to the outside. What other fuel would you use?