Full-Dive Virtual Reality Gaming

[Winter Wonderland]

Imagine, for just a moment, that you've had a stressful day at school. Maybe you've been bullied, or got a bad grade on a test, and you've come home. You're ready to blow off steam. You walk right past the outdated console gaming and strap on a helmet, and off you go into an entire new world where you are whoever you set out to be. Everything in this world, you can interact with. Smells, tastes, textures, sounds, sights, and feelings. Once you've had your fill of your virtual world and feel better, you simply log off and resume your normal life, doing homework and such. This is the world of Virtual Reality.

It may seem incredibly science fiction-y, but the truth is, we're slowly getting there. With things like the Occulus Rift, and Sony's Project Morpheus, we're finally delving into the world of Virtual Reality gaming.

So, this poses a few questions:

When do you expect for full-dive technology to be available? Full-dive meaning that every sense is available, you're essentially being transported into the game(a la Sword Art Online).

Should this technology be available?

What are the pros and cons of such technology?

Would you hope for VRMMORPG's or nothing MMO?

Would you take part in using this technology? Why or why not?

 

[Alice]

I do think true virtual reality will exist in my life time, but not with a helmet. If you actually think about the logistics of how it would work, using your own brain to process your character in the game isn't actually feasible. You'd have to prevent all signals coming from you body from reaching your brain, and instead reroute them to another computer that will return signals to the body to make sure it functions properly. You'd also have to prevent all signals coming from the brain from reaching your body, and reroute them into the game to control your in-game body, which will then return signals to your brain the same as your real body would. That makes plenty of sense, sure... but how do you do that without physically severing your brain's connection to the rest of your body? As far as I know you can't.

Instead, I think how it will work is your entire mind will be uploaded into the game, then processed by the game as if it's actually you, then when your play session is over, you will download the new memories back to your brain. In this case, you don't actually ever play the game, you just remember playing it. However, if your play session can be processed quickly enough, you'll never know the difference. If you played the game for say, 2 hours in game time, and no noticeable time passes in the real world, it'll feel like 2 hours passed like normal, and you spent that time playing the game. The real difficulty in doing this comes in creating a computer that can process that much information that quickly. Using optical or quantum computing however, I think it may be possible.

 

[Winter Wonderland]

I do think true virtual reality will exist in my life time, but not with a helmet. If you actually think about the logistics of how it would work, using your own brain to process your character in the game isn't actually feasible. You'd have to prevent all signals coming from you body from reaching your brain, and instead reroute them to another computer that will return signals to the body to make sure it functions properly. You'd also have to prevent all signals coming from the brain from reaching your body, and reroute them into the game to control your in-game body, which will then return signals to your brain the same as your real body would. That makes plenty of sense, sure... but how do you do that without physically severing your brain's connection to the rest of your body? As far as I know you can't.

Instead, I think how it will work is your entire mind will be uploaded into the game, then processed by the game as if it's actually you, then when your play session is over, you will download the new memories back to your brain. In this case, you don't actually ever play the game, you just remember playing it. However, if your play session can be processed quickly enough, you'll never know the difference. If you played the game for say, 2 hours in game time, and no noticeable time passes in the real world, it'll feel like 2 hours passed like normal, and you spent that time playing the game. The real difficulty in doing this comes in creating a computer that can process that much information that quickly. Using optical or quantum computing however, I think it may be possible.

Actually, the technology to control things with merely our brains already exists. There are a few to mention, most notably, the Emotiv EPOC. This device essentially replaces your mouse and keyboard on your computer, and allows your brain to do all the work for you. You can, essentially, control your character on a game, for example, RuneScape, with just your thoughts. Of course, this system is far from optimal, but the technology does exist to do these tasks, already. But, I think I understand one of the problems you states, about the messages reaching our bodies. For example, if I swing a sword in-game, what stops me from flailing my arm in real life and accidentally knocking something over? That question still remains unanswered, but we do have several steps in the proper direction.

 

[pokecole]

SAO!!
As much as I like the idea, it has a few issues that I would hope will be fixed. As in SAO, you are unaware of anything going on in your surroundings. This is really dangerous in my opinion. Crime rates would go through the roof as soon as this came out because of this issue. I mean, what criminal wouldn't try to rob someone when they are completely unaware of their surroundings and can't even hear you. It would have to have some sort of alert system to prevent you from getting, quite literally, robbed blind.

I wouldn't morally have any problems with anyone using it, as well as myself, because it just seems like further evolution of gaming. If you want to do something and commit a lot of time to it, go right ahead. Just don't call me when things go south.

 

[zSpirit]

4 years later, but if anyone stumbles upon this by curiosity, 2035 to 2040 would be a logical guess.

What we discovered in these last 4 years are amazing and computing is getting better in the blink of an eye.

Though we still have pretty primitive usage of the technology, in 17-22 years our understanding of it will have gotten many times better.

We are closer than we think, the world will change so drasticaly in the next 50 years that humans won't remember what its like to make food for yourself, of even a world before advanced reality was but a dream.

Things are getting intresting so get exited, the world of sience will finaly show how smart human kind is.

 

[Desert Stream~]

Oh I'd LOVE something like SAO! Preferably without the permadeath, but I'd get it either way. As for a timeframe, around 2040 sounds logical. I'm expecting the next few years to be really great, and then a dead period for maybe 10 years, and then a huge surge in new technology.

Should it be available? Uhh, as long as it doesn't stop people from working :p or hopefully by then we have robots to farm our food for us lol

And I guess I'd hope for a bit of all genres? I'd love to play a virtual reality jrpg, but I'm not quite sure how well that would work compared to something like an MMO.

 

[strangerhypno]

Off-topic but I'm wondering why old posts are being necroed a lot. Isn't this against the rules or frowned upon in most forums?

 

[Desert Stream~]

Off-topic but I'm wondering why old posts are being necroed a lot. Isn't this against the rules or frowned upon in most forums?

oh, didn't even realize this was an old post lol, yeah it is I think