Existenz is better than them all.

AHHH!!! I forgot Existenz!!! People as stupid as me shouldn't be allowed to live!

Actually I feel the biggest problem with virtual reality, assuming the graphics are truly photo-realistic, would be the severe screwing of your sense of reality.

I've read an article which stated that if children were to watch 3D Tv extensively it would screw with their real-world depth perception.

Imagine you're a kid and you're playing video games just as much as you used to back then and imagine how different your perception of reality would be if those games looked and felt completely real. I'm not going to go the alarmist route and claim it would be the end of our species or anything like that but the way it would fundamentally change the way we think and interact with reality deserves some consideration, I think.

I once played a virtual reality game. You stood on a platform with a ring sensor, they attached you to a chord protruding from a pack wrapped around your waist, you had 2 controllers one on each hand that looked like black power gloves, all topped out with a helmet that completely obscured the outside world. 15.00 for 5 minutes of a Mech Warrior type arena with flat shapes and bright colors. The cord would simulate impacts and collisions as it yanked you back. The helmet was pretty heavy too.

Very fun in 2000. I wanted one for my room.

:o]

Unless Virtual Reality presents me with technology like they have in the spacecraft on the TV series 'Earth: Final Conflict', I probably won't adopt VR.


'13th Floor' or 'eXistenZ' are good candidates

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFods1KSWsQ

I personally don't think the benefits of full body control outweigh the significant disadvantages. It's also partly mitigated by humans' innate ability to perceive tools as an extension of the body which can extend even as far as a game controller. Many players already describe being immersed in existing games without any special technology; replace the monitor with a VR headset and you've made it that much easier to get into that zone of feeling that "I am walking forward" instead of "I am pushing up on the left thumbstick to make my character walk forward".

3D effects are concerning because it's a perspective trick, not because it seems more realistic. All current 3D effects work by tricking you into perceiving layered 2D effects as being three-dimensional. Reports of discomfort or other difficulties with viewing 3D effects are due to it all being a trick rather than the real thing. This is in contrast to the holograms of sci-fi where the simulated objects are being projected into true 3D space so are just as real as anything else.

Addiction to photorealism isn't a concern for a long time yet. Other humans are extremely difficult to simulate with satisfactory accuracy due to humans' innate ability to sense even the slightest imperfection in a human-like figure; representations that are highly accurate--but still not accurate enough--are responded to more negatively than those that bear a more superficial resemblance (the uncanny valley). Because of this we'll probably reach a point where real-time 3D humans get only so good and no further; amazing graphics won't help sell a game if a large portion of players experience discomfort or even revulsion when interacting with the game's almost-human characters.

The analogy I was making was that our brains come to expect certain things based on prior experiences.

The experience of being tricked into thinking a 2d image is 3d, if done for an extended period of time with a developing mind, will affect how the brain expects objects in a real-world perspective to behave. So the brain has conditioned itself to measure distance a certain way based on faulty information and thinks that ball is a lot closer/farther than it actually is.

In context of VR it simply means that the rules one becomes accustomed to in VR don't apply in the real world, naturally, and so it may cause some problems, again, I'm talking about children who spend what would be an unhealthy amount of time learning faulty information about how the world works.Now that I think about it, this could extend to social interactions in addition to the physical ones.

But the thing I was really hinting at would be the inevitable questioning of what is real and what is not. When I said "photo-realistic" I actually meant "completely realistic", I'm aware of what the Uncanny Valley is which is why I emphasized "truly" because I've never been impressed with so-called "photo-realistic" graphics, they're good, but I can still tell it's CG.

So yeah, I'm just clarifying that I am speaking in the context of a perfect (ideally adjustable, I don't want to fall victim to the square-cube law when I'm in my giant robot) reality simulator when I mention the problems that could arise. And as I said in my first post, I'm not trying to be an alarmist, just pointing out some things that probably will be a big problem for a few people, predisposition to mental problems and all that.

As far as you know would this or does this play havoc with pilots who spend a lot of time training in a simulator? TBH I'm just curious as hell and you really seem to know your stuff.

And The Thirteenth Floor

Ghost in the Shell has nothing to do about VR at all, by the way.

I'm still hoping that by the time I become an elderly VR will have evolved to a level that they can just hook me up and I can spend the rest of my life in some great virtual world :3

Thanks but I said Ghost in the Machine not Ghost in the Shell. Ghost in the Machine doesn't have much to do with VR but there is a brief scene where a kid gets trapped in a VR arcade game with a serial killer who has died and transfered his soul into the internet which, yeah, done to death pardon the pun. :P

sorry, reading comprehension failure...


edit - but watch Thirteenth Floor :)

I will. I see it on every once in a while and I will make a point of it. Thanks for the rec. :)

I wouldn't say so for two reasons. One, they're adults and so they already have a functional model of reality but more importantly they still have feedback telling them they're not actually experiencing the situation being presented; people talking in the background, lack of G-forces, etc., but my understanding is the actual flight physics are pretty sound as far as those simulators go.

I guess the real confusion is the terminology, I'm taking the concept of "virtual reality" to its logical extreme: Matrix-style brain-jacking or a hologram room which inexplicably is able to push its walls infinitely further from you (does the floor move and change shape? How is that figment able to hit me? Are the walls forming fists to punch me? I've always found that version far less plausible) versus a helmet with a screen and maybe some gloves or a controller enclosed in a round cage. We'll probably have a new term entirely for the Matrix-style VR when it comes to it.

The former is liable to screw with anybody, even if you were to put some sort of watermark to indicate that what you are experiencing isn't real who's to say someone just neglected to add one when you don't see one? The latter might screw with depth perception if a kid plays 5-8 hours a day but probably wouldn't raise any metaphysical questions.