Get With It, Virtual Reality!

I am not a gamer, neither in the gambling sense nor the video game application of the term. Aside from playing the state lottery (no more than $1 at a time) during the late eighties and early nineties, I have felt no desire to put my money on the line. Nor have I ever felt any kind of gambler's high as the result of a "win". I know the odds generally disfavor me, so why bother?

The same goes for video games. When my son was growing up in the nineties, he went through various stages of video games, starting with those slow ones on the desktop computer and then graduating into Sega Genesis, Nintendo, and beyond. I particularly remember enjoying watching him playing the Sonic the Hedgehog series. But me playing? It never captured my imagination (although I did for a time like to play a game called "Qix" on my brother-in-law's ancient Nintendo system). Even the games of today, with their superior, more realistic graphics, just don't duplicate reality enough for me. I need more. I need to be immersed within the game. I need virtual reality.

Tad Williams' grossly underrated four-volume science fiction Otherland series takes the development of virtual reality and gaming to its logical conclusion, a hundred years into the future. Gamers enter an extremely realistic alternate reality as the characters of their choice, instead of the current practice of watching a screen and manually manipulating controls. Like today's World of Warcraft game, participants meet up from all parts of the world, their true identities unknown to each other. This immersion in another "world" is what appeals to me.

But I see virtual reality technology not only for what it can bring to gaming. With the development of robotics and space propulsion technology, I see exploration of other worlds opening up for anyone to participate in as virtual "astronauts". And the locale for exploration need not be hospitable for human life. So one could fly through Jupiter's atmosphere or explore the extremely poisonous and hot surface of Venus this way.

I went to my county fair a few years ago. It had an exhibit promoting virtual reality that greatly disappointed me by its very primitive and unrealistic nature. Surely this must be something that computer software and hardware developers and gaming businesses can see as the future for their industries. Virtual reality is already being used to bring different parties together from distant points for conferences, with the participants assuming virtual identities for the meetings.

As a matter of fact, can I just go out on a limb and say that virtual reality will be the coming crucial element to the next great period of growth in our economy? It will make our current state of computer use look like the stone age and will cause those growing up within its culture to wander how people managed to survive in the early 21st century!