So - I'm the person who took this photo and first posted it to Reddit and Imgur. Honestly. Shortly thereafter I felt badly about it and took both posts down, but as often happens on the internet, the image has taken on a life of its own.
Anyway, I just wanted to provide a little context for this photo. It was taken in Bangkok, Thailand, at the Siam Paragon Mall in the Samsung shop. The guy in the picture was, presumably, experiencing VR for the first time through the Gear VR and was sitting on a motion seat, that seemed to moving along with whatever he was watching. The seat was in the front of the shop, facing out into the hall, and there were a number of people watching him. I thought it was quite an image, for all sorts of reasons, so I took a photo and shared it the next day.
My intention was never to shame this guy. It was, rather, to provide a little comment on what we all seem to be progressing towards, my self included, as more and more of our lives is experienced primarily while sedentary and interacting with screens.
What's missing here is some context about life in Bangkok. Thai people, traditionally, have been very industrious, active, and healthy. Increasingly, however, people are living in cities like Bangkok - which is a huge megacity - working in offices with sedentary jobs, living in tiny apartments with little room to move, stuck in a city environment which is an overwhelming cacophony of noise and concrete, spending huge amounts of time in malls (the quietest places around), interacting with the world mainly through computers, and eating sugar-filled processed food. This is a huge contrast from the past, and is contributing to skyrocketing levels of obesity and ill health.
Bangkok is the kind of place that, for me, is overwhelming after just one or two days, after which I feel desperate for any safe space I can escape to - whether that be the country-side, the ocean, the mountains, the movies, my computer, or VR. I'm fortunate because I am not from Bangkok and I can escape, but most people there can't. That makes an escape through digital technology, such as VR, extremely appealing. It will be really interesting to see how this technology catches on in Thailand. I suspect it will end up being huge.
Anyway, my rambling point is that the guy in this photo is very much the victim of the Bangkok environment he lives in. It's very, very hard to live one's life in the center of a mega-city and stay healthy and fit. My point was not to make fun of this guy - whoever he is. It was to recognize that, with an increasingly urban, sedentary, digitally-focused life, this the direction we're all moving in.