Electronic Birding Hide

When virtuality becomes as realistic as reality, it'll still be used mostly for much the same as fiction (and before that, dreams) have always been used for, for the thought experiment of being in a problem and resolving it. Even when there is no need for it when there are no such problems, people will still do it because when they log out, they can put it all beside them and say it doesn't really affect themselves anyway, but in the real world they become bored from the lack of problems, so they log in again, to have a purpose, even if it's a fictional one.
Just like people now go to the gym to train muscles they don't need and wouldn't normally use, people will train themselves in their ability to deal with problems they don't face in reality, just to show off. Eventually, some fanatics will go in deeper and deeper until they wipe even their memory that their in a simulation, and at some point they'll wake up and think, "Woah, I really went too far this time, that took like a lifetime."
Yet when they think back of the memories, they'll smile. They'll still want that information from somewhere or other. Then one day, we find another species very much like ours is now, and the whole world is united in an effort to learn everything there is to learn about it. The thrill would last years, maybe even a decade — what would seem like centuries to us — but eventually, merely probing it is no longer enough, and people become more and more involved in their lives, until they begin to subsume the information in their brains into their own. So when we're done studying and someone asks, "Should we actually help them, or contact them?" we'll just say, "Nah, there's still more to study, we don't want to disturb the subject" and go on squinting through our telepathic binoculars from our electronic birding hide.