Real Virtuality

Defined by opposition to VirtualReality, which is what you're immersed in when dealing with a computer, as the materialization in the real world of something that comes from a computer. This is a possibly cranky idea of KaiCarver.

A most common example of this is the printer, where a text in electronic form becomes a text that you can handle in the real world. It would be cool if you could "print" an electronic recipe into an edible meal (like much (all?) computer-generated stuff, it wouldn't usually be as good as the real thing, but it might be useful).

Actually that's one of the more mundane goals of MolecularNanoTechnology

I'm increasingly convinced that VirtualReality, which was quite the hot topic just a short time ago, is tired, and not the most interesting thing about the computer revolution. Real virtuality is more interesting in that it promises to augment our everyday reality in hopefully interesting and useful ways. Evidence of this is for example the interest in ubiquitous, mobile and wearable computing, cell phones, PDAs, etc.

Yeah, a far out example is nano-technology. Slightly less sci-fi is robotics. And in the super-mundane category, automatic tellers.

Isn't this the same thing as ReplicatorTechnology?

(Of course) there is more on MeatballWiki: http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RealVirtuality