I’m sitting in a darkened theater, just feet from a giant curved screen projecting the panoramic image of a lake ringed with trees, the water piercingly clear.

At a podium in front of the screen stands Jeff Fougere, innovation strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Well, not exactly. Fougere is at his home outside Minneapolis, and I’m at HPE’s office in San Jose, California. We’re meeting in a perfect VR replica of HPE’s customer innovation center at its global headquarters in suburban Houston, identical down to the texture on the navy blue armchairs, the upholstery so realistic-looking that I keep running my hand over it.