No Pervasive Virtual Reality Networks

As was pointed out in FailedScienceFictionProphecies, one of the things that we were told we would have by 2001 (at least in the cyberpunk of the '80s and '90's) would be a pervasive, all-encompassing virtual reality network. While WilliamGibson probably gave it its first fully fleshed out form, the best technical description of it is probably in SnowCrash by NealStephenson, who goes so far as to describe how the standards committee worked out the protocols.

Out of all the science fiction prophecies, this is one that I'm still holding out for. It may take another 10 years, but I'm nearly convinced this one is coming. What leads me to that? Well, the incredible popularity of games networks like UltimaOnline? and battle.net for one. We now see people paying REAL MONEY (on eBay) for imaginary items that only exist in the shared collaborative world of these networked games. We also see hackers and crackers turning from invading government and corporate systems into mastering the protocols of these games so as to make their characters more powerful, or to kill opposing characters.

Especially as we finally get to the point where "Goggles and gloves" become cheap and reliable enough to make a useful combination for sensory input and output we should see this technology expanding beyond games into more areas of business. We just need to see the first "killer app" for business based on the Quake Engine :)

I keep wishing it would happen too, just because SnowCrash is so cool, but I'm actually now pretty convinced that it won't.

Outside the specific case of simulating a real 3d environment, there are just too few cases where n-dimensional data could be represented more understandably by projecting onto three dimensions than it currently can be in two.
Even when the data is naturally three dimensional (the terrain) the natural human response is to step back from it so that it can be analyzed in 2d (the map)

Man is not a 3d animal; we evolved in a 2.5d world. We have a concept "next to" to describe laterally adjacent objects without specifying which way round they are. What's the equivalent for vertical adjacence? Height matters [Umm, 'above', 'below', 'on top of', 'underneath'? ] No. If A is next to B, B is next to A. If A is above B, B is _not_ above A. So that doesn't satisfy 'without specifying which way round they are' [Oh. I was operating under the assumption that the question wasn't stupid. "Next to" works for horizontal or vertical arrangements.]

The two buildings are next to each other. John works on the second floor, next to Adam on the third floor.

[Man is not a 3d animal? What about "left of", "right of", "in front of", "behind", etc? Seems to me that those are just like "on top of" and "underneath".]

According to Gibson, the Neuromancer novels are set some 70 years into the future, so he may have been more accurate than this page gives him credit for :-) After all, we don't have huge space hotels full of decadent Europeans or Rastafarian groups taking over abandoned orbital factories yet. We don't even have orbital factories or space hotels at all, despite what people are trying to do with the Mir platform!

Really, VR is a ridiculous interface. It also doesn't fit on my cellphone. See also http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?VirtualReality.

New cellphones are being sold in with StereoScopic? 3D screens see http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,39020351,2131347,00.htm They say: "Sharp already sells a mobile phone with a 3D screen for the NTT DoCoMo? network in Japan"

VR has the same problem as AI - The MovingGoalPost? problem. As soon as something is "solved", it's no longer considered part of the field.. Consider that we now have all manner of input devices, wearable displays, excellent 3d rendering, broadband to the house, blind people "seeing" through digital cameras with neural interfaces, etc. - but we don't consider it VR. Even the old goggles & dataglove is now laughable compared to a CaveSystem?. We are currently living in the VrWinter?(compare: AiWinter)

Nice analogy, but even so: we have all this technology, but what are we actually doing with it? Blind people seeing through neural implants is great news, but what they're seeing is real reality (or the best approximation of it that technology can attain), not virtual reality. Just what are the applications for interfaces involving direct manipulation of brightly coloured polyhedra?

One step in the right direction on this is Croquet (http://www.opencroquet.org/). A framework for distributed 3d environments. Not just as a neat kind of chatroom, but as a pervasive metaphor for average-user computing and educational computing. It also handles distribution from the ground up, which is a nice idea. It may eventually allow rudimentary component programming. You have a box that contains "components" which you wire together, then you step through a portal outside the box and see it's barely larger than your hand, and now a component itself.

I think because most of us are engineers and architects of software (and thusly, we demand the most efficient interface first and the most friendly interface a distant second) we forget the value of this kind of metaphor system. Once you train your brain to work within the confines of a desktop computer's current interface paradigm, it's terrific. But the average people out there, not to mention young children, could gain a lot if computer interfaces were made more accessible.

Just because you or I prefer Emacs/VI to work on the guts of a system doesn't mean my grandmother has to suffer though C-x C-c Y and GuiMaze?s.

http://www.secondlife.com is another MMO "game", which is a kind of virtual world.