A lot has been said over time about the finity or infinity of the universe. Whatever the resolution of this is for the physical world, it seems as if the virtual universe is virtually infinite. Based on solely zeros and ones, man has created a universe that in potency might be even vaster than the one made out of atoms.
As with all discoveries and inventions, virtual reality too can be used in a positive and negative way. What;s the future of virtual reality? Do you think there will come a time when this virtual network will be of more daily importance than the ‘real’ physical interactions? As it seems, various fields -e.g. stock markets- are more or less already taken over.
Are we approaching an era when the virtual world of now will be the real world and vice versa?
Who knows. we probablly are already in a virtual world. who knows how old the universe is. there might have been trillions upon trillions of races like us way before us. The big bang might have been the beginning of our universe but it might the end of some other universe.
nescio, here do you mean immersive simulations of physical worlds or the e-fication of physical world activities, like stock brokerage and mail, which dont offer the same experience as their real world counterparts, nor attempt to do so, merely sustitute their function? the usual sense is the former i might add.
I'm Kool: of course your speculations are just one of many. But if we compromise that the so-called physical world is the 'real' world, I wonder what consequence the virtual world will have for the real world?
ravage: indeed usually with virtual reality is understood to be the simulation of the real world, but the common implicit endgoal of this activity is to create a virtual reality that is not mere simulation, but one step ahead: independent functioning???
as for the e-fication of world activities, they can be seen as the virtual realities of those activities: in one way or another e-mail can be seen as the 'virtual simulation' of the letter.
Interesting Q nessie, I understand your mean: if man would ever create something like the matrix?
Picture this: an astronaut on Mars sends a rover out to investigate a risky-looking crater. Slip-sliding down the crater wall, the rover sends signals back to the Mars Base where the astronaut, wearing VR goggles and gloves, feels like she herself is on the slope. Is the find important enough to risk venturing out in person? VR helps decide :halo:
This is already possible, but to create an immense independent working universe? That might be possible but not just yet. That will take atleast decades to work. All the VR worlds available now in the most high tech labs have learnt to respond to some or other reaction written by man kind. It s the same old principal of action=reaction. If I do this, this or that will happen. It all consists of plain zero’s and one’s .
Since the beginning of VR there has been a dawning awareness among researchers that human factors are crucial to VR. Age, gender, health and fitness, peripheral vision, posture, the sensitivity of the vestibular system : all of these things come into play. Even self-image matters.
So I wonder how where the boundries are. But I dont see them come anny day soon.
The computer needs to advance thousands of times to have enough power to create a VR world which is completely independent. And even then, I dont think I ll be completely independent
edit:/
your post reminds of a piece I read about Artifical life, because that s what your aiming for I think
will try to find it..
as for AI: yes, that is one form of independent functioning. As for your argument about in the end it will still all be ‘action=reaction’, ‘IF…THEN’: the human body works exactly the same: ‘IF a signal reaches ur muscle, THEN your muscle moves’. instead of zeros and ones in VR, we are just amino acids, lipids etc.
my main question could be: “will there be a virtual world in which man will function just like in the ‘real’ world”. for example: when u wake up, u don’t go into the real world, but put on ur goggles, and enter the virtual world.
i was incredibly inspired at one point in my life by this movie the 13th floor. theres been a spate of such movies since then, but the idea of that was that scientists had created this immense virtual reality world, and things were starting to go wrong. eventually it turned out that their world itself was a simulation.
but its incredibly difficult to imagine us doing anything remotely close to this in the near future.
distant future.. maybe. if all our physical world's cares are taken by machines and all we do is remain hooked up to a simulator, fed intravenously. but then.. consider the responsibility of the virtual world designer. we could either become micromanaged devices with their lives attuned to keeping the system going flawlessly to a system attuned to optimising happiness ala Brave New World, or the virtual world would effectively be exactly like this one, where we would be required to work, virtually, in order to live. In the former case, I, like the Savage from the book, would cry out in disgust at the mechanicity of our lives. In the latter, I would see no point to it.
: all of these things come into play. Even self-image matters.
But I dont see them come anny day soon.