Brain plague or estate agents? I know which I'd prefer in Virtual Reality Life in a London firm is tough: it’s full of jewel heists, flying bullets and car chases. Well, this was the case during my last foray into Virtual Reality. London Heist is one of the showcase games for Sony’s PlayStation VR experience from Sony and it’s virtually perfect, making me feel like the lead in a Guy Richie gangster …
He gestured at the tall banks of buildings that loomed around Central Park, with their countless windows glowing like the cave fires of a city of Cro-Magnon people. "All is dream, all is illusion; I am your vision as you are mine."
Pygmalion's Spectacles, Stanley G. Weinbaum, 1935.
There was a Terry Pratchett short story published in 1990. I read this in about '91. I did a quick google search and it has been included in the short story anthology 'A Blink of the Screen'.
It is also talked about here, on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/9M9H9E9/comments/4jq493/just_remembered_a_terry_pratchett_short_story_i/
Basically, somone dies whilst immersed in VR. Thing is, according to the online world, they aren't dead.
No mention of red dwarf's Better than Life? (1988)? Ooops sorry obviously only a list of serious sci-fi. Similar premise as described for the unincorporated man but no plague, a much more believable drug analogy.
And it's funny.
apps (... ) from (...) CNN, Hulu and Netflix.
The real world in the virtual world. Or the virtual world is the real world.
The whole thing reeks of Second Life... and I for one wouldn't mind if it crashes and burns the same way.
VR obviously has its applications, and there will be niches where it actually can be a game changer, but all this overhype, this painting it as the next greatest technological revolution, gets really tiresome.
Um, I've heard that 2D porn has one great advantage : you're not shutting yourself off from the world and therefor are not liable to be totally surprised by someone walking in on your, ahem, fun time.
If you remain tuned into the world around you, you have time to recover and set things right when you hear the garage door open (I've been told).
In any case, I'm quite sure that VR has a place, most likely in gaming (obviously). I do not see that VR is going to bring anything to teleconferencing, not does it improve in any way people analyzing floor plans. What does VR bring to a virtual tour of a building that a flat screen does not ? A mouse costs less than a VR headset and likely always will.
This whole VR fad is like 3D cinema. It's nice to see a new tech becoming available, but the hype will have to pass before we see the true, boring applications that actually survive and thrive.
"This whole VR fad is like 3D cinema"
The point surely is that 3D cinema doesn't really work. The only people who see the 3D effect properly are the ones directly in front of the centre of the screen; everybody else is off to the edge to some degree and yet is seeing the image they should be seeing if centred. It is unsatisfactory for most of the audience.
VR is per user and so the off-angle effect doesn't happen. It can be made to work as intended.
Get a Vive and play Roomscale games. Without those, you move around the virtual world by moving around the real world, so there's no dissonance. It means the games are limited to a few square metres (usually however much floorspace you have available in your home), and use teleport to travel larger areas, which can break disbelief, but it eliminates nausea.
> VR made a false start in several films during the 1990s.
Don't forget Strange Days - perhaps not fully interactive VR, but the notion of shady geezers selling bootleg VR grot out of a van, and paying people to make it seemed far more plausible than the likes of Lawnmower Man, and presaged the internet porn industry pretty well to boot.
Another one for the movie list:
World on a Wire (Welt am Draht, 1973) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Based on the novel 'Simulacron-3' by Daniel F. Galouye. It has VR inside VR. Has aged remarkable well and still is worth watching.
As to the VR-and-porn debate: anyone who lived through the 'cyber sex' hype two decades ago will be very sceptical.
As to VR in general: those who can actually profit from using VR in their work already use it. The gear gets better all the time, but that's about it.
That's just given me a flashback to being in college in 1998 and having a foursome in an old, HTML chatroom for the alternative genre (Dungeon of the Damned if I recall) and thinking I'd hit the big time. This was whilst I had a girlfriend with whom I had real sex, but I rated the HTML stuff far more exciting.
WTF did I do with my youth....
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