Amazing Possibilities in Virtual Reality

I think that people tend to greatly underestimate how amazing (and also insane) virtual reality could be one day, once it achieves all of the following:

(1) sufficient image and audio realism that (at least a lot of the time) your brain is fooled into thinking it is having a real-life experience (state of the art is progressing steadily in this direction).

(2) massively multiplayer real-time environments (with fast internet and computers with state of the art GPUs, this is fairly doable already)

(3) real-time transmission of facial expressions (from a person’s real face) onto nearly perfectly realistic avatar faces (some prototypes exist already, and deep learning methods likely make this quite achievable in the future)

(4) accurate simulated touch on the hands when you interact with objects (the whole body is certainly better but not really essential)

(5) lack of motion sickness (systems today tend to cause motion sickness for certain types of VR activities, especially when there is an especially large discordance between what your vision predicts you should feel and what you actually feel)

(6) very accurate ways to map real complex environments so that highly accurate models of them can be put into VR (technology for this exists already and is continually improving)

(7) a large user base (without this, there won’t be much demand for the creation of amazing VR environments – of course, the supply and demand drive each other, and as the user base increases, that will drive down costs).

Smell and taste synthesis would both really be nice to have, but neither of them is actually essential to the experience. Simulation of airflow (e.g., wind on your face) would also be nice but is certainly not needed.

If the above advances are achieved, here are some amazing and/or totally crazy things that you may be able to do in VR:

Movement things: imagine if you could teleport instantly to whatever environment you wanted to be in, or request to teleport to “where” a friend is to experience what they are doing along with side them, or teleport a VR object to anyone. You could (physically) live in an isolated, very low cost of living location (as long as it has fast internet) and still live the social life that you want.

Physics things: have you ever wanted to know what low gravity feels like, or what it feels like to be so strong that you can lift up a house, or what it would be like if time moved more slowly for you than for everything else?

Dangerous things: since you can’t actually get hurt in VR, you can safely simulate the thrill of extreme sports (e.g., base jumping).

Identity things: what if you could look like WHATEVER you wanted (including a different gender or a different age or an animal or something no one has ever seen before)?

Copying things: VR objects are just software, so they can be copied instantaneously at no cost. While some kind of copy protection system might exist, presumably, lots of open-source objects would exist too. Like the way that VR tree looks? Copy it for later. Like the way that person looks? Make a copy of their avatar if they let you. How about that plane that you might want to try flying in later? It’s yours.

Wondrous things: explore the world’s greatest monuments, coolest architecture, grandest museums, best musicals (and watch from any seat in the house, or from right on stage, or even be one of the actors).

Horrible things: this may be a very bad thing about VR (it’s up for debate), but (like Westworld, only much cheaper) VR would let you experience doing things that normally would be horrible to do, like committing extremely realistic seeming murder without actually hurting anyone (whether realistic seeming AI’s or paid actors).

Hard things: there are many things that would be hard to do in real life that VR could make much easier, like exploring the moon, exploring underground caves, hiking Mt Everest, witnessing simulations of aurora borealis or bird migrations, etc.

Remembered things: imagine being able to call up replays of any experience you’ve ever had in VR (and even to view these experiences from different angles than you did originally, and to allow others to experience what you did). Imagine both how awesome this is and frightening (if all experiences and conversations that you are a part of are recorded automatically). Perhaps user permissions could be set to prohibit others from reviewing experiences you were involved in.

Impossible things: see the world from the point of view of an insect, or see what it would feel like to live the life of a tiger having to hunt and forage, or fly around the world like Superman, or explore a simulation of the inside of a human body, or see what things would have looked like at different points in history.

Convenient things: imagine being able to hang out with your friends easily even if they live across the world, or if you live in a remote place, and imagine if instead of getting coffee, you went to the moon together or hung out by a beautiful waterfall at sunset. Or have a business meeting with someone across the world where your brain is fooled into thinking you are 5 feet apart in a conference room.

Social things: VR makes new forms of socializing possible since it could make it possible to interact with total strangers (a) anonymously, (b) without fear of danger, (c) without concern for how far apart physically you are located (d) in simulated environments that differ from physical ones while still (e) having it feel like socializing for real (not like staring at each other through a small, laggy, pixelated window). How these changes would alter how we socialize and how we meet new people is hard to predict, but you can bet that in some ways it would be a whole new world.

A lot of these possibilities are amazing and wonderful. Others are terrifying, at least to some. Still, others hint at unpredictable (but potentially radical) changes to society.