During the past two years, the amount of time the average Internet user spends online each week has risen from 4.4 hours to 7.6 hours. If that annual growth rate, 31.5%, holds up, then in 2025 the average Internet user will spend 590 hours online per day!

O.K., so extrapolation has its limits as a predictive tool. Still, you have to wonder. As cyberspace absorbs more and more of our work, play, shopping and socializing, where will it all end? What activities will still be off-line in 2025?

A few candidates spring to mind. Brushing your teeth. Eating. Playing tennis. Right? Not so fast. Even some of these seemingly solid barriers to the Internet's encroachment are shaky. A quarter-century from now, almost everything will in principle be doable online, and convenience will often argue for doing it there.

Bear in mind, for starters, that in 2025 the average American will have, as they say in technical circles, bandwidth out the wazoo. You won't just be able to monitor your child's day care by webcam (a service already offered by more than 100 day-care centers). You'll be able to monitor it in high-definition 3-D format, providing valuable perspective during slo-mo replays of block-throwing incidents.

And this is only the beginning. Just ask Jaron Lanier, who coined the term virtual reality. Lanier is chief scientist for the "tele-immersion" project, part of the federally subsidized research program known as Internet2, which explores the upshot of massive bandwidth and computing power.

The standard virtual-reality experience, you may recall, involves donning a head-mounted display or special glasses--or, in principle, contact lenses--and thus entering a computer-generated fantasy world. As you turn your head or walk around, the computer adjusts your perspective accordingly. Tele-immersion is to videoconferencing as virtual reality is to Pac-Man. If it works, it will give you the visual experience of being in the same room with a person who is actually in another city.

So what's the killer app for tele-immersion? "It's not so much a matter of particular applications," says Lanier. "It will just become part of life. It will be used by teenage girls to gossip, by business people to cut deals, by doctors to consult." And presumably by people who want to do long-distance lunch. Of course, there won't be any point in saying "Pass the squash," but otherwise it will be a normal mealtime conversation. Eating online.

Speaking of squash, playing racquet sports at long distance is in principle simple. If you've got a squash-court-size space to run around in, you can play with your college buddy, wherever he or she may be. (And no more annoying collisions with opponent, walls or ball, since all three will be illusions.) In fact, using standard virtual-reality technology, people have already played tennis remotely, Lanier says. But each looked to the other like a cartoon character--an "avatar." Tele-immersion will let you see the agony of defeat on the face of your vanquished foe. A big advance.

Mushrooming bandwidth and computing power aren't the only things drawing us deeper into cyberspace. Global-positioning satellites are turning driving a car into an intermittently online experience. And the high-resolution satellite images that became commercially available last year will move the earthiest of endeavors into cyberspace. Sitting at a desk will soon be the fastest way for farmers to inspect their crops for signs of blight.

Obviously, some pastimes lose something when performed online. (No, I'm not going to talk about sex.) Consider hiking. True, you could don your head-mounted display and get on your treadmill while a friend did the same in another city. If you wanted a whiff of pine or cedar, you could crank up the computer-controlled aroma synthesizer that the company DigiScents has said it will market. Not too tempting, right?

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