The Next Frontier, Virtual Reality

In my last blog post, I ended with the thought of creating fully traversable worlds within VR.  Now I ask what if the next frontier for humanity isn’t reaching Mars in space, but reaching Earth inside virtual space? 

This will be more of a hypothetical blog, but I really want to talk about a fictional piece of virtual reality technology from a fictional world and how our world would change if it really existed.  The device is called NerveGear, a helmet shaped device from the light novel Sword Art Online.  It utilizes something called Full Dive technology that sends electrical signals directly to the brain to reproduce the five senses and allow the user to roam in a virtual world while the device intercepts signals from your brain to your body so that when you want to “move” your virtual avatar moves instead of your physical body.  In short, you are inside the Matrix without the need for a plug in the back of your head.

In this story, a programmer traps the minds of 10,000 people inside of a medieval fantasy adventure VR mmorpg called Sword Art Online with the NerveGear.  He set the NerveGear helmets to literally fry a person’s brain if he/she were to die inside the game or if someone tried to remove the helmet in real life.  The only way for everyone to be realized was if any player inside the game could clear all 100 dungeons of the game.  Fast forward 1 ½ years, the trapped players have grown accustomed to the virtual world.  After spending every day moving inside a virtual world, eating virtual food and being stimulated by the virtual environment, many people have come to accept the VR world as their “real” world and acted accordingly.  At one point in the story the main protagonist noted that the only difference between the virtual world and the real world was the quantity of information.  He said that “The boundary between real and virtual will become more and more blurred in the future. Right now, there’s still a difference in the amount of information making a wall though…”

As of our currently technology, the information that we are capable of replicating are sight and sound; however, in the past 2 decades, we have advanced visual graphics from pixels to high resolution 3d environments and audio from record players to 3d surround sounds.  What’s not to say that we couldn’t find a way to replicate the other 3 senses?  With time, we could possibly fully replicate even the finest details of life into virtual reality.  And once this technology is achieved, couldn’t we theoretically live inside the virtual worlds we create?  Common jobs like desk jobs or such could easily be replicated inside a virtual world and replace the need for corporate offices.  Transactions and meetings cross continent could happen inside a virtual room.  We could train pilots or soldiers with virtual equipment without endangering their lives or wasting materials.  We could explore the world while posing no real danger to our actual bodies.  The only times we would need to leave the VR world is to exercise or eat food to sustain our bodies.  Instead of expanding into the space frontier, if we could successfully expand into the virtual frontier we could have access to a seemingly infinite world or worlds.  And most importantly, we could live out our wildest dreams inside these virtual worlds… as long as were aren’t forced into it by robots like in The Matrix.

If space ever becomes too dangerous and expensive of an endeavor to explore and colonize, I would urge the scientific community to turn towards the virtual space and to develop a way for us to explore the virtual horizons.