A commercially viable form of virtual reality in the chemical processing industry is being enabled by integration of several parallel technology revolutions underway in the fields of process modeling, large scale optimization, reduced instruction set computing, expert systems, precision measuring systems, smart instrumentation and new on-line analysis technology. Capability to peer into many alternative future scenarios with great precision re-defines process optimization to include open and closed loop "classical" steady-state optimization, dynamic optimization, improved monitoring, tracking and post auditing of performance versus plans as well as off-line engineering, operations and maintenance applications. This paper summarizes recent commercial results in process optimization applications and provides some suggestions for new academic and industry work to support the vision that is supported by this paper.