Virtual reality, telepresence and remote viewing are regarded as the most promising tools for visualising and transferring complex information. Taking into account that space operations per se need such tools, science fiction offers a wealth of impulses in how to further these assets. The experience of a teleoperator (e.g. medical specialist) could be superimposed on a local robot or human, guided by force fields or a teleoperated exoskeleton. Remote operations, for example strip-mining on a lunar base, are often called "the next best thing to being there". Increasing the sensory input for the operator is called "augmented reality", which includes, for example, measurements of physical properties such as radioactivity that a human would not be aware of.

The potential for spin-offs is obvious wherever humans have to encounter dangerous environments like hot zones of nuclear power plants, sub-sea mining, etc. A great many of such augmentations might take place not only in the hardware, but mainly in the software field. Virtual reality can be fairly easily processed by artificial intelligence systems which filter unnecessary information and come into existence as virtual agents. However, some authors warn of the potential dangers of depending solely on "Virtual Augmented Realities". In societies where modern production conditions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles in a broader sense: everything that has directly lived has moved away into a representation.

Science fiction also predicted tele-operation, with the term "waldo" coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1942 novel "Waldo", which was adopted when the technology came into existence later. In "Waldo", a crippled genius living in a zero-g home in orbit around Earth finds that he may need his fellow humans even more than they need him. Heinlein's description long predated the telepresence gadgets now common in high-radiation environments, on research submarines, and aboard the Space Shuttle. No article about telepresence and virtual reality would be complete without mentioning Wiliam Gibson's "Neuromancer" published in 1984. Computers suddenly had a cool but dangerous new dimension - Gibson called it "cyberspace".

There has been much enthusiasm generated when it comes to telepresence, tele-operation and virtual reality in general - in the "Asteroid Man" by R.L. Fanthorpe (1960) or Robert Sawyer's 1999 novel "Daily Life in the Year 3000". However, there are several dangers to telepresence and tele-brought realities which are also discussed in science fiction. In "Society of the Spectacle", Guy Debord raises a number of postulates why and how telepresence and virtual reality start to influence our society in a negative way. The science-fiction film "Telepresence" focuses on the people who populate a small military outpost, one of several scattered among thousands of asteroids. The group fights the enemy by "telepresencing", utilising remote attack robots linked to the soldiers by cerebral cortex implants. At a certain point, people begin to realise that their implants have started to mutate and therefore have a significant impact on their off-duty lives, leading to increased aggressiveness. In the short story "The Next Best Thing to Being There", Mike Combs describes the problem of a remote operations base at the Lunar South Pole. The tele-operators there who are operating the robots by means of augmented reality have an increased sense of aggression.

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