What Will Virtual Reality Look Like in the Future?

"In the slums of the future, virtual reality junkies satisfy their violent impulses in online entertainment. An expert player discovers that the line between games and reality is starting to fade away. 3DAR’s latest short film explores the frightening potential of our next technological revolution. Behind the scenes coming soon! Stay connected, but not too much ;)"



Commentary by Louis Shalako

What does the future of virtual reality look like?

It’s a complex question and one well worth asking.

But when the cat is scratching at the door to come in and it looks like a Pokemon, that would be one logical outcome for those with the desire and the cost of admission to a whole new world, one that is an artificial overlay on all that is real.

In Vernor Vinge’s award-winning Rainbow’s End, people wear ‘augmented reality’ glasses and other hardware, which allows them to superimpose whatever gloss they want upon their present surroundings. In a case like that, one person might live in a perpetual Disneyland, while another might prefer a world where every person or object is modeled on the Flinstones. If you like Clint Eastwood and scenes of people on horseback riding across the Painted Desert, you will be able to superimpose that sort of thing onto your present circumstances. A really good system would give everyone a western drawl. 

You could take a really interesting vacation and never even have to leave home.

In a world of increasingly grim inequalities, virtual reality might mean that whatever shoes you’re wearing look like Guccis rather than a ratty old pair of runners, long since due for replacement. When you take off the goggs or shut down the implant, reality comes back. 

But then, reality has always been perception--and now we will be able to control those perceptions a little better than we could before.

In a proper game-space, where all the machines, ‘wearables’ or implants even, would all be talking to each other, how we present ourselves to others would be a matter of choice, (just as it is to some degree now). The other person, similarly-equipped, may see that we are wearing Gucci footwear when really, we’re not.

People of all ages are sort of living in the Pokemon Go world now. They’re not even wearing special goggles. They seem intent enough on the relatively small screens on their smart-phones, to the extent that they’re stepping out in front of buses and falling off cliffs already.

They’re walking around with their faces down and their attention elsewhere. Virtual reality might be somewhat less dangerous because it will be totally immersive. In this virtual future, a person might choose to have city buses appear as charging rhinos. In a virtual world, one would hope that peripheral vision would be roughly as good as our own natural vision. The odds are that we won’t be stepping out in front too many charging rhinos, chugging diesel fumes and squealing the brakes, going down Main Street U.S.A. anytime soon. Let’s hope not, anyways.

Virtual reality is not just for fun and games. Scientists will use virtual reality in a number of ways.

Sensorama, 1950s. Photo Minecraftsyco, (Wiki.)

A robot equipped with enough sensors will be able to show all angles as it enters a nuclear reactor facility under meltdown and show outside observers exactly what’s going on in there.

Observers will be able to slip on a headset and look up, down, all around at no risk to themselves.

With improved medical imaging systems, a surgeon might be able to ‘make himself really small’ with virtual reality. They will be able to stand beside a tumour deep inside the brain and direct laser beams, micro-scalpels, or a small cluster of nano-bots to more accurately excise a tumor for example.

Soldiers will train on virtual reality renditions of sensitive targets without having to build an expensive, and rather insecure mock-up, which will become increasingly difficult to hide or camouflage from space-based observation as time goes on.

I have minimal experience with virtual reality. A few years ago, a buddy had a set of FatShark goggles and a camera aboard a model airplane. The aircraft was equipped with a video transmitter, and he had an antenna and recording unit on the ground, with the goggles plugged into the system.

He could fly the plane from the point of view of the aircraft itself—the only real complication being that when he swiveled or panned the camera, tilted it up or down or whatever, it was easy to lose that centred, forward view. The field of view was also quite small. There was a learning curve and it involved not just adrenalin, but some disorientation as well. The field of view is limited, but makers are continually improving the product. When you move your head inside of a proper game-space, the view changes, just like in real life.

I was wearing the goggles when he finally brought it in for a landing. With the ground, real enough, coming up at me, I literally braced my feet for impact and tottered back and forth, heart pounding, as the machine hit the grass.

It’s also pretty amazing when the plane is rolled, looped or spun. Reality, or a real model airplane flying in a real atmosphere, isn’t even really necessary to the equation. There is nothing real about World of Warcraft. People become totally immersed in a violent and convincing rendition of a battlefield. There is the sound and the fury, the flinch as a spear or sword comes at the player. The only thing lacking is blood, but there might even be some real fear in there, once a player has really let go of their external circumstances.

In terms of history, and many other applications, VR might be a useful teaching tool or a 

learning experience.

Weaponized.

It’s real enough, or it certainly could be and the peaceful uses of virtual or augmented reality are presently being explored. It may be possible to plug directly into the brain, in which case the deaf might hear and the blind might see, a case of a parallel technologies, based on many of the same principles as VR. The real difficulty there is the brain/electronic interface, another problem that science and manufacturers are working on.

In the future, virtual reality, like all tools designed and built by humans, will be weaponized.

It will be used to save lives, to improve lives, and ultimately, no doubt used to take life as well.

As for the author, I have to get back to the game. Them other dogs are beating me at poker (again) and I need to sting somebody for cab fare at the very least.

END

The Body Hackers.

Neil Harbisson. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

In the future, will all babies have an identifying chip implanted at birth?

“It’s already been done, as long ago as 1998, by what are described as ‘hobbyists.’ The first reported experiment with an RFID implant was carried out in 1998 by the British scientist Kevin Warwick. As a test, his implant was used to open doors, switch on lights, and cause verbal output within a building." 

"The implant has since been held in the Science Museum (London). Since that time, several additional hobbyists have placed RFID microchip implants into their hands or had them placed there by others. Amal Graafstra, author of the book "RFID Toys," asked doctors to place implants in his hands. A cosmetic surgeon used a scalpel to place a microchip in his left hand, and his family doctor injected a chip into his right hand using a veterinary Avid injector kit. Graafstra uses the implants to open his home and car doors and to log on to his computer. Mikey Sklar had a chip implanted into his left hand and filmed the procedure. He has done a number of media and personal interviews about his experience of being microchipped.” (Wiki.)

***

What about Vernor Vinge’s story, Rainbow’s End, where people used contact lenses and glasses to overlay new, augmented realities on the real world around them? And what happens when they are no longer accessories, but installed or built-in to human beings?

“Pre-Google Glass, a Canadian professor had a pair of computerized glasses ‘permanently’ attached to his skull. When another person insisted he remove the glasses and then tried to rip them off his face, trans-humanist enthusiasts called it "the first hate crime against cyborgs."

But now we do have Google Glass. Now we can wire our enhanced spectacles, our satellite navigations systems, our Wikipedia, right into our heads. We could have night-vision, or watch our kids walking home from school from thousands of miles away.

‘Body hackers’ are already among us. They’re making the experiments in the classic Frankenstein sense, right in their own basements. Who knows where all this will lead, but with a chip implanted in your head, projecting text, images and sound directly into the brain, will mean that in the future you will be able to access all of human knowledge via Wifi, anytime you want it.

It seems only a matter of time before aficionados will use the same technology that will cure deafness in some folks, in order to implant ‘headphones’ in their ears. The technology used to cure blindness will be used in other, mass-market products.

Human beings (the more affluent ones) will be, like Steve Austin, ‘bionic people,’ and while the ability to leap a  tall building at a single bound captures the imagination, it is the intellectual and even just the entertainment fields that are probably more relevant in normal daily life.

All of this will come to pass, for when has humanity ever passed up a good thing? Simple eyeglasses change our perception. We have come to accept false teeth, implanted teeth, hair transplants and mechanical heart transplants. We have come not to accept breast implants, which would have been a wonderful thing for women who had gone through a mastectomy, purely on grounds of self-esteem and psychological recovery from traumatic cancer surgery, but to demand them as our right in the case of less than well-endowed and very young women.

It is aspirational in the sense that some think it will help in their careers—actresses, models, porn stars yes, and of course there is that unspoken need to attract suitable mates and the unwritten laws that go along with it.

They have become status symbols in a way that the artificial hip has not.

***

I’m old school, I like typing away on my physical, plastic, electronic keyboard. I don’t mind it, I’ve gotten used to it, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than the old cast-iron framed typewriters.

But we’re already seeing people walking down the street ‘swiping’ at their phones.* The person sitting in a coffee shop, head wired for sound and tapping away on an invisible keyboard while they write their magnum opus, one visible only to them, might not be too far away.

The guy sitting at the back of the room with his own system, trying to hack into their heads for the sheer hellery of it, isn’t too far away either. New gifts bring new dangers.

Business executives might want to have a quick look around inside other business executive’s heads before signing any contracts, just to see what sort of people they are dealing with.

There will be locks, and blocks, and hackers trying to get inside of your head and probably trying to make you do things you might not have done otherwise.

Why risk your own valuable skin to rob a bank if you can just find some other physically-fit specimen to do it for you? Someone you can trust, because you control what goes on inside of their head and can make their legs move even when they would prefer not to like some cyborg cockroach.

***

Convicted felons out on parole might be implanted with a chip.

If they strayed from home during prohibited hours, law enforcement could track and monitor their movements. If everyone in the world was chipped, there would essentially be no unsolved murders, (that’s the theory) but any crime fiction writer could beat that—a killer simply cuts his hand open and leaves the chip at home on the bedside table while he goes out and does the dirty deed.

A surgeon in some rogue state cuts it out of your head and off you go to do your crime. When you come back, he has already filled in the blank time period with typical touristy stuff and he then re-implants it.

It will soon be illegal not to have a chip, and all sorts of detectors at airports would not just scan for metal, but for the embedded chip. A chip-less person would be suspicious in the extreme.

With chips embedded, employers would always be able to track employees. Such chips are relatively cheap. 

You can hardly buy anything worth more than about twenty bucks at a big-box department store without a chip somewhere in the packaging, and alarms will sound if you attempt to walk off without paying. In an environment where they now have self-serve checkouts, retailers see this as necessary, even desirable for just-in-time production and shipping, stock control, and tracking our buying habits, all of which demand streams and reams of data on a moment by moment basis. It hinders, but does not prevent shop-lifting because thieves learn quickly and know how to remove a chip before leaving the store.

A recurrent theme in the works of science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer involves uploaded consciousness. 

In Mindscan, a man with a fatal condition uploads his consciousness into a newer, healthier version of himself.

If consciousness could be uploaded, presumably it could also be downloaded.

So what about a downloaded consciousness? In the future, as a form of augmented reality, for a small fee, a person might be able to go to iTunes and download somebody else’s conscious experiences.

You could be Lady Gaga for an hour or so. It would only cost $0.99 after all, and you would know exactly how it feels to be onstage as her. You would be Lady Gaga, or Ryan Seacrest, or any celebrity who has such programming available.

In the case of Lady Gaga, you would get to sing a hit song and be somebody else for a while—someone who could actually sing, and a longer program might involve her experiences in longer form.

You might arrive at a concert venue, meet with adoring fans backstage, sit through the makeup session, choose the wardrobe, and then go out on stage and perform the entire show as if that was really you and not her. You would feel all of her physical sensations, and the love of her audience.

The boys might prefer James Bond or even a porn star like Johnny ‘The Wad’ Holmes.

It wouldn’t be long before purely artificial experiences become commonplace. The creator opf the work would own all rights and cut out the celebrity middlemen.

Sports stars, football players, will also be big revenue earners in this scenario.

It’s a lot better than our own boring little lives, isn’t it?

Be anyone you want to be.

The process, once the technology is in place, would be a fairly simple one. Lady Gaga would have her own chip, and it would simply record all of her perceptions during a concert tour. The data would be downloaded out of her mind, and stored on a hard-drive for later.

With some editing for time, and suitable bridges between scenes—the term ‘commercial breaks’ quickly comes to mind—what you end up with is just another entertainment product.

It’s not the most noble endeavour, but it would certainly generate revenues, and for some that will always be enough justification.

It could also become a teaching and learning tool—anything is possible, and so far the limits of the new technology are still obscure.

***

“From locating lost children to keeping financial data and medical records handy, people are about to see a surge in data chip implants. Able to transmit and store data, chips will soon enable people to verify their identities, see if their children have traversed the boundaries (or ‘hopped the geo-fences’) set for them, give paramedics and doctors immediate access to their medical records, allow people to go wallet-free as they pay for groceries via a hand-swipe, or even store educational and employment data for a job interview. But what if the police can use it to track how fast someone is driving or monitor a person’s whereabouts? Can these implants become a mandatory form of ID? How do people protect their privacy from hackers? Can this data be sold to law enforcement or other companies? Does the good outweigh the bad?” (Laboratory Equipment.)

***

Now that we have the ability to map the brain, to detect, observe and identify brain-wave patterns, and with the whole world wired up with a chip in their heads, it would eventually be possible to know what every citizen was thinking at a given time. It would all be wireless and monitored by artificial intelligences working in real-time.

From there, it is a short step to the embedded Taser in the chest module and a long list of infractions, real and imaginary in the case of authoritarian or even just overly conservative governments.

Think the wrong thought and zap! You’ve been busted and punished all in one fell swoop in a scene reminiscent of an early Star Trek episode.

Hell is a little bit further down that road, but not too far. Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, there is a very good chance that we will get there eventually.

That’s why the time for debate is now.

END

*Such people will quickly find themselves waking up in the middle of the night and their hands are just swiping away in some subconscious locomotor patterns, which are very strong and become quickly ingrained.

Years ago, I set up a video camera at one end of the room and then went back to working on a book. It was amazing how often I reached for a smoke, a lighter, a handful of potato chips, a drink, or the ashtray, and that hand-to-mouth pattern became really distinct on fast forward. It was quite sobering.

One reason it’s so hard to quit smoking: “What am I supposed to do with my hands?”

It’s also one reason why so many people gain weight when they quit smoking. They keep wanting to stick something in their mouth.

Another good question: what deeply-rooted human need or desire is that major locomotion pattern attempting to feed without my even being conscious of it?

It’s not necessarily just about food or drink, the very real and understandable needs of the body.

The mind and the psyche are involved too.

Retailers will take advantage of all this, I have no doubt of that. Retailers in a consumer society have always known about human insecurities, hence tooth-whitening, breast implants, high-end cars and all the usual cosmetic and prosthetic devices and products we buy on a daily basis.

Okay, now I’m done.

***

Here is my new collection of short stories, Dark Satires. Thanks for having a look.

Push-Button Warfare: a science-fiction, comic book world.

(Norad Command Centre, Wiki Commons - Public Domain.)


In terms of push-button warfare, we live in the science-fiction comic-book world of our youthful imaginations. The trouble is we don’t know it. We haven’t figured it out yet.

The transition from conventional to push-button warfare.

The transition from conventional to push-hutton warfare has been so seamless that no one noticed. Back then, when someone coined the phrase ‘push-button warfare,’ we all nodded sagely and thought that meant some military personnel sitting deep underground, thoroughly trained, with nuclear-hardened command and control systems, and responsible oversight, composed of some duly-constituted authority acting on behalf of some identifiable polity. With a smidgeon of moral rectitude we hoped that our missiles were so much better and more numerous than our enemies’ missiles that they would never risk the all-out confrontation. We thought it meant satellites, and drones, and robots. In some ways we were right, because we have all that now, don’t we? The future really did come true.

In more recent times, there are media reports, interviews, and official documents including the national budget which make provision for the latest big threat facing us, terrorism, which includes cyber-terrorism. Billions of dollars will be spent globally to fight online wars which, deep in some underground bunkers, are being fought right now by highly-trained military and other professional personnel. They still follow the standard model of traditional warfare with modern adaptations. Like many threats, it’s a bit over-rated, but the tax dollars must go somewhere, as it contributes to GDP, and this is as good as anywhere.

No one saw it coming.

No science fiction writer or futurist of the world of thirty or forty years ago ever envisioned in its fullest detail, the true nature of the threat. If the pen is mightier than the sword, it is also rather limited, just as the sword is, for other uses. But we don’t use pens now, or swords. We have something much better.

We have the internet, and now, ladies and gentlemen, we have a battle for the hearts and minds of the people. It’s all over the evening news if you care to observe, rather than just watch. The internet and social media are abuzz with players in the game.

I don’t want to underplay the role of Homeland Security, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service or other international agencies involved in the constant struggle to protect national interests in the rapidly-growing field of electronic warfare. This is not a new field, but in the past it was mostly directed outwards. It is a rapidly growing field, and it is increasingly being focused inwards.

The enemy lives among us.

The enemy is mobile, and the enemy is dispersed. It is self-evident. The enemy lives among us.

No one could deny that this is an actual war, one that is being fought right now—just go up to any responsible leader, whether in government or opposition, and ask them. None would state otherwise.

Foreign and domestic terrorists and organizations large and small, with any sort of anti-social agenda, or those with political, ideological, social or even completely irrational agendas will turn to computers, the internet, cloud-based systems, social networks, websites, viruses and hacking in order to further their aims. Anarchists will try to ‘destroy the world’ simply because it is there and maybe now there is a tool better than a thrown cast-iron bomb with smoldering fuse to achieve their goals.

The odds of a one-man operation with a pistol providing justification and thereby setting World War Three in motion are fairly remote these days.

Not the Real Threat

Even this is not the real threat, because it is at least on the radar, and with all due respect to various and sundry minorities, the perpetrators will often fall into recognizable demographic criteria. They generate chatter. They must communicate. They move about, in ways that can be observed, and documented. They can be profiled, and detected, they can be prevented, captured, tried, and punished. They can serve as a ‘deterrent’ to other like-minded individuals. This involves new challenges, not unnaturally. Gathering intelligence, assessing individual threats, engaging in counter-operations, is not easy when the enemy is dispersed or sheltered to some degree by rogue or unfriendly states. It’s not easy when the enemy lives among us, and looks like us, talks like us, and lives like us. Prevention is most difficult when suspects have legal and human rights, and access to a system of checks and balances, meant to prevent tyranny from ruling over us.

This is the ‘obvious’ threat, and one much talked about in media, and yes, science fiction.

The Real Threat.

But now we live in an environment where a person, sitting quietly in the privacy of their own home, acting unilaterally, with no training or identifiable ideology, of their own accord, can set in motion a train of events which will, eventually, with a logic that cannot be denied if the laws of causality have any social application at all, change the world. They can do it for whatever reason, or for no particular reason at all.

In my humble opinion, no one saw that forty years ago, and most would deny it now. I say that because of all the mistaken assumptions we will make.

What if they are non-violent? What if their goals are not anti-social? What if they are quiet and well-behaved, and do not enter into ill-conceived conspiracies? What if they keep within the bounds of the laws of the nation-state in which they reside? What if they do exactly the right things, and say all the right things, and what if they are charismatic, articulate and persuasive?

What if everyone thinks it’s a joke, and just laughs and turns away?

Every day we click on these little mouse buttons, most of us barely knowing what happens when we do.

With a click of a button, this person—a private citizen, is going to change a few outcomes. Those outcomes lie far in the distant future, and no one can safely predict exactly what forms those outcomes will ultimately take.

But they don’t care. Any notion that warfare should be conducted by ‘gentlemen,’ in ‘a civilized fashion,’ went out the window a long time ago. It is better to divest ourselves of such illusions.

And the war for the future is already on as far as this writer is concerned. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen—the war for the future is and must be fought in the present moment.

Hopefully the right people will win it, but you never know.

Most of those who read this will not live to see the benefits, or the cost. Still, we must all do our duty.

It goes without saying that God is on our side.

And the first casualty of war is Truth. The second casualty is compassion, and the third is respect. Wars, no matter the state of the technology with which they are fought, have a way of becoming a little too personal very, very quickly, no matter what bright and shiny new weapons of mass instruction are used.

It’s a risk we must be prepared to take.



Disclaimer: This is a work of satirical speculative non-fiction. Dreamers in general and persons or entities in particular who wish to change the world should always seek to comply with state, federal, international and local ordinances. While this confers immunity to nothing, it is in essence your only protection, and it helps to keep certain moral obligations in their proper perspective. At the time of this writing, nowhere in the world has legislation been enacted prohibiting or otherwise limiting behaviours intended to interfere with the future outcomes presently indicated by factors which occur with depressing frequency upon this timeline which we refer to as ‘reality.’.

Planning, Plotting and Scheming.

c2011 (S)


My fourth novel, (SF) still awaiting suitable cover art and more free time for re-writes, incorporates world and ecology-building of a journeyman level, including hard and soft science fiction story elements. In this book I experimented with my own comfort zones as a writer, in terms of characters and their sexual preferences. I say this because the unsophisticated will always associate the writer with the thing that most stands out about the story in their own minds.

My fifth novel, (urban fantasy,) is safely in the can. It's a low-key, understated urban fantasy. It was a departure from science fiction into a world that had always impressed me as a little too easy from the writerly point of view—that is to say, ‘if your protagonist gets into a corner, all he has to do is to wave a magic wand and make everything go away.’ I’m not sure if I still feel that way. The rules of fantasy are there if you care to look. ‘Magic is acceptable and expected.’ But another consideration was how to compete in a field where ‘over the top’ is what people seem to be shooting for.

My solution—to downplay the fantasy elements and treat it as literary fiction about life in a small town after the mill closes down, where there just happens to be some shape-shifters running around, will probably fail in this market.

My sixth novel, (SF,) back again to hard sci-fi, allowed me to experiment with the creation of really different characters interacting as a group, while at the same time fine-honing the work, hopefully, showing rather than telling. The number one protagonist—there’s actually more than one—is an entirely humourless, yet still sympathetic character. Like an idiot, I called him ‘Kjarl,’ which any experienced editor would insist that I change. By this time I was comfortable with the pacing of the novel, as these last three came in at 76,000 to 80,000. This is perfect length to begin editing and re-writing the works.

When I look back a couple of years, and think about what I have learned, it does give me some confidence that I can plug away at my next book or story and get the thing done in fairly short order. All I have to do is to write five hundred or a thousand words a day, and keep the first draft a little light on details. This story (my new Maintenon story) was a 360-word start, until someone on Twitter mentioned, ‘a 20-minute writing blitz’ while her dinner simmered on the stove or something. I thought, ‘why not?’ It's up over 20,000 now. An hour a day, and in about a month we’ll be up to 40,000 or 50,000 words.

When I get this one ‘done,’ it would be a good time to make some decisions, about what to publish next. Then the re-write and editing process would take a few more weeks or months. In the meantime, if I stumbled across the perfect artwork, something that I could work with for the marketing image, it would be tempting to do one of the three books I have sitting there. That part is flexible in terms of planning.

Every so often, when I get a spare minute, I go off to morguefile.com or photobucket.com and look for images, as I also want to re-issue ‘Thirty Years Gone,’ in other formats. Right now, it’s on Lulu.com with a plain black cover in the pdf format only.

So basically, we're planning, plotting, and scheming our way through the next few months. Rather than dwell on our weaknesses or past failures, we've been doing some assessing of our strengths, our skills, and our special attributes, insofar as they relate to the future.