Virtual Reality and the Future

Ever wanted to walk round your SecondLife house in REAL life?

I wrote an article that may interest some SecondLife users. It discusses possible future technology and uses some of the ideas in SecondLife.

You can read it here:

http://www.paul-almond.com/TakingTheVirtualOutOfVirtualReality.htm

I was kinda thinking the same thing, only I didn't write it down. Damn.

(VERY VERY good work. Everyone go read it. You are amazing.)

Buster

Awwwwwhh... Now we're talking!

(where do these ancient ALTS come from???)

Well, whoever you are, you rock!

(Probably Kris Kritter, but who cares)

SL overlaid into physical reality via GPS / Wearable computers? Wooo!

Talk about multi-dimensional reality.

Hey Diaspar,

How about this? "The true global village"

Let's say you take the world and scale it down so a city like new york is a parcel and a nation is a whole sim.

If you wanted to meat people from your 'virtual reality' in new york, you could socialize / communicate with them in SL just by going to the parcel.

Different realities could be set up according to interests and hobbies and what not. After socializing a little in SL you could say "hey lets meet in RL".

i had a similar idea 5 years ago. I called it the Overlay. Too bad i didn't write it up...lol I agree with the idea of integrating RL and VR which will make interaction between the two more pertinent and useful in my opinion. good work! let's make it a Vreality.

Can I ever turn the GPS off?

This would be good for getting on-the-spot locators and reviews for restaurants and things, but otherwise I'd rather not. Reality is a bit too information-dense for my tastes already.

Check out any of the "Ghost in the Shell" materials for the potential dangers of augmented reality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Good reading for anyone who plans to be alive over the course of the next 20-30 years. I advise reading every character of that post and following the links. I will be writing up some stuff about the TS and how it relates to SL in my blog at some point.

Yeah, love Kurzweil. Fantastic Voyage is a great book.

I also worked with Hugo De Garis at ATR, where we were doing AI research. Now there was an odd duck.

thanks for the link crystal

I've referred this article to several friends and a couple other pages I frequent. It's well written and thought out.

I just want to point out, though, that this is by no means a new idea. However, from a technology standpoint, it's the closest I've ever seen to feasible - to the point I would seriously consider forwarding it to several companies and/or submitting the idea to the U.S. Patent Office had I been the writer.

However, there are a couple holes in the scheme you've laid out, at least from what I read of it. Forgive me if I skimmed over the answers to a couple of these.

1) In several areas you mention "filtering out" content in select ways. In much the same way people in SL gripe about privacy concerns due to said filtering, and the juxtaposition of "virtual attachments," how in theory would this play out?
2) In that vein, how would "smart filtering" transpire to keep content safe for the kiddums? Perhaps one might integrate Google-like content sensibilities into the mesh of this system?
3) One idea I rally against with your article is the persistence of "glasses" for using such a technology. Would it not be more feasible to use a one-eye representation of the "virtual" to allow people to "see" what is and is not really there? Would this detract from the ability to project "3D" virtual space?

At any rate, it's very good food for thought.

This reminds me of that multiplayer Pac-Man game in Japan. They wear semi-transparent screen over one eye and collect virtual pellets along the sidewalks.

Or this multi-player RL PacMan game... Pac Manhatten

Really interesting writeup. Regarding wearable computers, I recommend looking up the University of Toronto's Steve Mann if you haven't already. He's done some pretty wild stuff with annotated reality and wearable computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann, http://wearcam.org