  Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology of great societal potential.
Some of its most exciting and promising use cases include remote scene content
and untethered lifelike navigation. This article first highlights the relevance
of such future societal applications and the challenges ahead towards enabling
them. It then provides a broad and contextual high-level perspective of several
emerging technologies and unconventional techniques and argues that only by
their synergistic integration can the fundamental performance bottlenecks of
hyper-intensive computation, ultra-high data rate, and ultra-low latency be
overcome to enable untethered and lifelike VR-based remote scene immersion. A
novel future system concept is introduced that embodies this holistic
integration, unified with a rigorous analysis, to capture the fundamental
synergies and interplay between communications, computation, and signal
scalability that arise in this context, and advance its performance at the same
time. Several representative results highlighting these trade-offs and the
benefits of the envisioned system are presented at the end.
