I'm just saying that because we're just beginning to understand how to interface via machine with our visual and audio senses and we haven't dealt as much with smell, taste and touch yet.
I'd say at least 2040 would be more realistic.
Until then, I guess I'll have to settle with Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus.
If you wear this afro, your punch will become stronger!
I don't know. I think realistically I should agree with you, but optmistically I'm like, "We could have it by next year if we threw enough money at it!" And then I picture myself throwing $1 bills at researchers like they're strippers
Let's be friends!
Virtual Reality has existed since the early 1980s. Oculus Rift is the latest version. You wear something like a diving mask and use your computer mouse to manipulate controls. It's easy to fall and get injured, so I recommend sitting in a chair and having a friend nearby to catch you when you fall off.
The Nerve Gear in Sword Art Online sends microwaves into the brain to help you move your entire virtual body without lifting a finger. Microwaves don't work that way, although they can fry your brain.
There are several versions in progress involving dozens of wires attached to your head. I don't know the science involving synaptic knerves and stuff, but don't forget there is a real world out there.
Oculus rift and its 1980s counterparts are NOT virtual reality. they are just 3D glasses you glue to your face to pretend you are in the world. Unless you intercept brainwaves and can move your character by thinking while your real world body doesnt move, its not VR.
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The spirit of abysmal despair
Scifi is always overly optimistic, but people believe what they want. If you make a dystopian scifi then most people will think 'that could never really happen', but if you make a utopian one then everyone thinks that's what the future's really going to be.
The type of technology employed on this show might never exist. Humanity could become extinct in 100 years, or maybe this level of VR is just impossible or impractical. Or, maybe there will be some type of breakthrough which makes immersive VR tech ubiquitous before 2100.
'Virtual reality' displays like Oculus Rift are cool, but they're a long way from putting your entire body into a virtual world. The type of tech in the show would have to supplant most of your nervous system and would likely require surgical modifications like in The Matrix or eXistenZ.
Another form of immersive VR would be like the holodeck on Star Trek TNG. But *that* was never properly explained even on the show. It was supposedly partly holograms and partly replicated material, so many things on the holodeck were real. But it was never explained how much space the holodeck took up (it seemed expansive), or whether or not the people (NPCs) on the holodeck were real people. Also, holograms don't work in real life like they do on that show. Light doesn't stop in mid air, and there's not much reason to believe that that sort of technology will ever exist.
Scifi shows are really just mythology. It's fun to believe they will all be real some day, but you might as well believe in Egyptian mythology, or Greek or Roman; people believed those were real but only because it made them feel better about life. You never know what breakthroughs will or won't come or what sort of world we will create.
Interesting take.
Yeh I agree with scifi being optimistic. I would even say naive and simplistic. But I guess scifi and especially anime, tend to oversimplify in the effort to just get on with the story. The tech is usually explained away with alittle more depth in live action movies. But as you stated science is a long ways away from accomplishing Nervgear technology.
Aside from that there are real ethical implications. But if we were to look at this objectively enough, lets dissect this in a technical sense. Currently as you stated our best bet is Oculus Rift technology. It is the best we have been able to produce until now. In the 90s VR tried to emerge as the next best thing to reality but the problem was due to insufficient hardware and super low resolution and CPU GPU capacity. Fast forward over 20 years of Moores law, graphics development and the rise of mobile computing (smartphones) And we are now getting to the cusp of what is the bare essentials to passable VR.
I say passable VR because from this point onwards it will be alot easier to fool the eyes with 1080P (soon to be 4K OLEDs) however we will still be along way away from photorealism and tactile feedback solutions. We might be able to get to 8K displays with photorealistic gfx by say late 2020s. But this won't mean we can feel and smell all that is necessary to fool us completely.
For this we will need direct brain to device interfacing, which is where Nervgear presumably sits (technologywise). Today, we see fledging technologies that allows for chimps to control robotic arms, but this is only giving us the sensation of autonomy in a VR world, which might be a breakthrough in the following decades. Having said that, we will still not be on par with what SwordArt online users experienced because that would require being in an altered state of consciousness ie REM sleep. Which is why users were able to be in a coma and still interact with the gameworld. This is a leap in technology unimaginable today. It would be alot easier to just have us control our bodies through some nervous system bypass while still being conscious since the video would be handled externally. But this whole notion about being unconscious is where science fact turns completely into science fantasy. There is no precursor technology we are researching currently that even reaches this kind of scientific inquiry into the human mind. The closest thing we might have is the Human Connectome Project, Which will map the brain to the last neuron. Aside from that we have some japanese scientist trying to record dreams, but that too is hit and miss.
Holography on the other hand has a better chance of reaching this sooner. By externalizing the stimuli in the form of good recreations of the game world in virtual form. Things like Project Wall are some attempts we see today by companies to master this in the near future. There was a scene in the movie "Her" which showed Joaquin Phoenix playing a very advanced AI game where he would interact with the game world with gesture controls (like an advanced Xbox Kinnect) but then have a wall projector, projecting the entire game world on his entire living room walls. I see something like this becoming an inexpensive solution. But it will by no means be Nervgear.
So going by the most accurate futurist projections. By 2022 Japan would of been enjoying 8K TV broadcasts for 4 years, thanks to NHK and its plan to televise the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in full 8K and begin 8K free to air broadcasting in 2018. Sony would of released its PS5, presumably with some form of Oculus Rift, and 8K ready. But there would be no real push to go beyond this at that point. Many people would still be stuck on 4K if the uptake to 8K doesn't happen quick enough.
we will still not be on par with what SwordArt online users experienced because that would require being in an altered state of consciousness ie REM sleep. Which is why users were able to be in a coma and still interact with the gameworld. This is a leap in technology unimaginable today.
Actually it is possible to stop light (or atleast lasers) in midair, I think it was something about passing through a lot special glass. You could search for it if you're interested.
shareI believe that true VR like in SAO will exist one day. But I don't think we'll see it in our lifetime. I believe the potential for VR lies in our subconscious mind. Dreams are the key here. Because if you think about it, dreams are like a form of virtual reality in the sense that when you sleep, your mind creates a world for you to inhabit and explore where you can go on adventures of all kinds. As for the way SAO portrays it with a machine that intercepts brainwaves and basically paralyzes you, the ethical hoops you would have to jump through would be outrageous and I don't see that happening anytime soon.
share[deleted]
Late to the parade. But the books were at the time set something like 20 years in the future at the time of writing. Alot can happen in that span of time.
Still the type of non-invasive tech the system uses is a bit further ahead than 20 years of tech advancement.
Now some sort of VR that requires some minor surgical implant to the base of the neck or skull would have been more likely. We are allready close to that on several levels.
But as the novels point out. The designer was a genius and devoted a-lot to realizing the tech. All it takes is one breakthrough or inspired leap to set things in motion.
At a guess the writer went with a non-invasive VR to set up the ease of getting so many and so varied a group of people into the trap.
Well, the author of the "Sword Art Online" light novel series first began writing the story in 2001, when 2022 seemed a lot further away than it does now, so it might have seemed a little less implausible at the time.
Some of the people on this thread are saying essentially that it's impossible or that at best it's something for the far-off hazy future, and their arguments are compelling. But I mean, it's hard to say where science is going to take us. I'm not a really educated scientifically-minded person, so I can't go as in-depth into it as some of the other posters here, but from my layman perspective, just looking at the world now and how incredibly different it looks from 100 or even 50 years ago, the rapid development of computer technology and technology in general, I say "never say never".
heh-heh. 50 years ago there werent even any real PC games yet.
10 years later Pong, Spacewar and the first real arcade games started to appear and not long after really take off.
A little less than 10 years later and the first real console games like the Atari started to show up.
10 years after that and we have the 3rd gen consoles like the SNES and now advanced sprites and effects.
5 years later and we have the 4th gen consoles with 3d graphics.
25 years later and things though have not jumped as much. 3d graphics are now very advanced and we have some prototype VR goggles around.
When the VR headsets become viable I think we will see another milestone. Possibly in 5 years.
As mentioned in the other post. I think we will see surgical interface VR long before we see wireless.