Virtual Reality (VR) and Full-Immersion Virtual Reality (FIVR)

[wjfox]

In the next few weeks, I want to re-write this 2039 prediction. It was among the first entries to appear on our timeline, and based largely on a forecast by Ray Kurzweil. Although I admire the guy, he tends to be overly optimistic in terms of timescales. In retrospect, after 12 years of research and writing on futurology, I now think it's highly unlikely we'll have so-called full-immersion virtual reality (FIVR) in just 20 years. I'm creating this thread to gauge people's opinions on the future of virtual reality and the "when" of certain developments.

It's true that technology is advancing exponentially, and will likely continue to do so in the decades ahead. But even with rapid progress, there's still a mountain to climb in terms of reaching the capabilities needed for real-time FIVR.

The human brain has nearly 100 billion neurons, and many trillions of synapses. It also has the blood-brain barrier to limit the entry of foreign objects. Computers might reach the scale of blood cells by the late 2040s, going by the current trend in miniaturisation...

https://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/202 ... me-mm3.htm





... but these will need production and deployment in vast numbers, coordinated simultaneously and in real time. Assuming it was even possible by then, why would people choose this highly invasive (and possibly dangerous) method of experiencing VR, when other options would be available that still offer a high-quality experience? The cost of FIVR would likely be much higher than conventional VR too, limiting its market potential.

Surely a more likely scenario is that conventional VR will continue to dominate for at least the next few decades?

8K displays (33.2 MP per eye) are likely to be standard by 2030 and are covered in detail here. I can then imagine 16K (132.7 MP) following by ~2040, reaching a level of photo-realism that's hard to distinguish from real life.

See my graphs here, for trends in pixel density:

https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-tre ... trends.htm





However, there's a massive difference between "goggles providing photo-realism" and "billions of microscopic machines connected to your brain cells providing photo-realism". The bottom line is that most people will be hesitant about such an invasive procedure.

I think a more likely scenario (at least for the medium term) is new form-factor options – such as contact lenses that beam graphics into your retina, alongside ear implants, and other wearables such as gloves, haptic suits/chairs, etc. For the more adventurous/hardcore gamers, these might be combined with some form of brain-computer interface, but in a limited way.

Laboratory research into FIVR might be happening by 2040-50, using mice or primates, but its usage in humans is something I view as a more distant technological prospect. And remember, we aren't just talking about the visual experience. FIVR would need to encompass the other four senses and include real-time input/output based on a vast ecosystem of thoughts/memories/emotions. It would also need human NPCs with perfect animation and facial models, full interactivity, etc.

All of the above seems very optimistic for 2039. So I'm interested to know what people think is the likely future evolution of VR, and when FIVR might become a reality, if it happens at all.

[Yuli Ban]

Much like with AGI, I think FIVR has a spectrum of architectural ability.

The "full thing," what we're waiting for— brain connected to computer, computer feeds brain an alternative reality that it accepts as real— is definitely far out. Barring AGI, I don't see it happening in the next twenty years. Even if we had the technology and capability to do it, even if it turns out that we can do it today with Neuralink or DARPA's cortical modem, it would take a COVID-19-tier crisis that incentivizes unlimited funding and forced virtualization for it to happen on that timescale. Unlike COVID-19, I can't think of anything that would get governments and megacorps to try to herd billions of people into FIVR systems. Again barring AGI, but even then that would only be if said AGI demanded humans being plugged in en masse. And that's a hypothetical within a hypothetical within a hypothetical.

However, "pseudo-FIVR" or "high-immersion VR" is indeed possible. This is more a case of biohacking than human enhancement however, and I know I've talked of it before. There are two ways to get to this:

1: Wear a conventional VR headset to sleep, and then wake up with it it still on and active. Your brain will automatically accept the virtual world as completely real for a short time until the immersion is broken. It's fleetingly possible that certain drug cocktails could extend the time of this virtual awakening, but it's definitely a glitch in our biology more than anything.

2: Controllable lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is wetware FIVR, as has been known for decades. If we can control lucid dreaming, potentially even using current BCIs to share dreams, then something like a biopunk VR could be possible. Starspawn0 thinks it's possible. But again, this presumes we can toggle our dreams to become lucid at any time as well as extend lucidity and dreaming as long as possible. And there's also the obvious drawback that it only works when you're sleeping. I'm not saying this is any less safe than directly messing with your neurons, but a techno-lucid dreaming junkie seems like someone who could easily suffer neurological damage. Still, this is the most likely thing that'll lead up to full-dive VR in the medium-term future. On some level, the only difference between a controllable lucid dream and FIVR is the ability to toggle when you're dreaming. But that's an extreme summarization that ignores the chemical differences between waking, dreaming, and lucid dreaming.

[funkervogt]

I don't think FIVR as Kurzweil envisions it will exist by 2039. The audiovisual aspects of VR will be almost 100% lifelike by then, but the experiences will not immerse the other senses (taste, touch, smell), and naturally moving around in VR (on something like an omnidirectional treadmill) will still be problematic.

[Metalane]

Hmm, interesting points from both of you. You see, at first I was going to argue the contrary that FIVR is actually closer now than it was in the past, so I would predict before 2039. But it depends on your definition of it. I believe it was StarSpawn that suggested that as early as 2030 we could have BCI enhanced headsets (I guess "enhanced" wouldn't be the right word as it would be the BCI itself) that essentially read our brains data and allow us to create simulations where our brains will basically "react" to to certain stimuli and the BCI will replicate it. I might be explaining it wrong or simply just misunderstanding what StarSpawn meant. Would the sense of touch be indistinguishable from reality in 2030? No. But maybe we could at least get approximations of certain sensations, including taste and smell. Visuals and audio might be the easiest since that's the dominant area that's being tackled right now.

So by 2030 at least we shouldn't expect FIVR in the sense where our brains are completely transported into this 100% world, but we should at least get primitive sense of it. It'll likely evolve akin to how graphics have been evolving in 3D simulations for decades where the first BCI VR headsets will feel "not quite there yet", but will rapidly progress as more brain data gets fed.

[erowind]

FIVR without mind uploading can only really be used positively if there are limits to its use that force people to spend time IRL too. Otherwise people in this society will largely choose to live in virtual escapisms to get away from the pressures of life while never actually being embodied in the digital world. I'll leave the reasons for why this society is failing us out of this thread, we all talk about it enough. What I will say is that if you feel like this like many of us do, try to strive for the kind of life you would want to live in FIVR in the real world as much as possible. For me that means community, art, meditation and science in this world just as much as it would in a digital world. I'm not saying its easy, but it's probably better than being misanthropic.

Why does mind uploading make the difference? Because with mind uploading we can form digital societies that are equally real to the physical world and equally connected to it. Greg Egan's book diaspora presented this in a positive light. There are 3 groups of human descendants in the book who all live peacefully, the antagonist of the book is an intense wave of interstellar radiation that threatens all of them and forces them to leave Earth. There are no human or transhuman antagonists present.

There are the Fleshers, hundreds of different transhuman species including normal unmodified humans who live on Earth with varying levels of biological modification. Fleshers live in small villages and cities and or among the ecosystem like animals do. There only a few hundred million Fleshers, they are generally confined to Earth.

Gleisners are humans who have uploaded their minds to physical robotic bodies of varying forms and were the product of the last human war around 800 years prior in the book. Gleisners live off of Earth as part of a peace treaty that no robotic life is permitted on Earth outside of an emergency. Gleisners are ambitious yet limited by their attachment to a physical body, they are actively building manned FTL craft and leaving the solar system but have not gotten as far as the third group. I don't remember the Gleisner population but it's similar to the Fleshers.

Then there are Citizens. Citizens make up the vast majority of the transhuman population numbering in the many billions. Most humans uploaded willingly once the Polises were developed and there are upload gates on Earth as part of the peace treaty allowing any Flesher to upload at will. The polises are a decentralized network of supercomputers and automated factories and robots maintaining and expanding them that is concentrated most heavily within the Earth's crust, yet, is always expanding outward to other star systems at around 0.1C.

Citizens live in different ethical and spiritual systems within their given home polis (server) but there is an agreed upon protocol that is universal to the entire network kinda of like a super advanced version of TCP/IP. The protocol mainly handles reproduction between citizens and prevents anyone from wantonly creating sentient life or abusing sentient life. I'll leave the details out because the book explains it way better than I do and is worth a read!

Citizens can also live independently of the polises and set off into space with a modest (server) of their own, although, very few do. I really fell in love with this story when I read it because none of the transhumans in the book are misanthropes who just goof of all day pursuing endless hedonism and fantasy. The book makes a point that some Citizens tried this initially and after a few decades or centuries either committed suicide or got board and started doing other things.

Greg Egan is very clearly a humanist, so there's philosophical bias, but I tend to agree, the human condition is not fit for endless hedonist escapism and we won't enjoy it forever even if a little bit of it here or there can be useful and healthy. Instead, Citizens generally spend their time making art, doing science, discussing philosophy, falling in love with each other, and overall living an enlightened existence compared to how most of us live today. Mind uploading is used as an enhancement to the human condition not a hindrance of it.

Sincerely, reading this book is what convinced me of transhumanism years ago. I want to live in a polis one day and do my part to help our species through these crises if I can live long enough so that we can all peacefully grow. Although, I must admit after learning more about ecology and coming to value it; there is something very appealing about being a Flesher for a few centuries too. It would be really cool to just become a mermaid person or something and swim around the oceans in mindful bliss for a while. Something that all the transhumans value is a connection to the physical universe. Whether that be living in it directly like a Flesher or a Gleisner, or, by observing it by proxy with scientific probes like a Citizen and on occasion fabricating a temporary robotic body to explore with.

From Greg Egan's Website for anyone interested in the book ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა

https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta.

Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision – an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

[Vakanai]

FIVR without mind uploading can only really be used positively if there are limits to its use that force people to spend time IRL too. Otherwise people in this society will largely choose to live in virtual escapisms to get away from the pressures of life while never actually being embodied in the digital world. I'll leave the reasons for why this society is failing us out of this thread, we all talk about it enough. What I will say is that if you feel like this like many of us do, try to strive for the kind of life you would want to live in FIVR in the real world as much as possible. For me that means community, art, meditation and science in this world just as much as it would in a digital world. I'm not saying its easy, but it's probably better than being misanthropic.

Why does mind uploading make the difference? Because with mind uploading we can form digital societies that are equally real to the physical world and equally connected to it. Greg Egan's book diaspora presented this in a positive light. There are 3 groups of human descendants in the book who all live peacefully, the antagonist of the book is an intense wave of interstellar radiation that threatens all of them and forces them to leave Earth. There are no human or transhuman antagonists present.

There are the Fleshers, hundreds of different transhuman species including normal unmodified humans who live on Earth with varying levels of biological modification. Fleshers live in small villages and cities and or among the ecosystem like animals do. There only a few hundred million Fleshers, they are generally confined to Earth.

Gleisners are humans who have uploaded their minds to physical robotic bodies of varying forms and were the product of the last human war around 800 years prior in the book. Gleisners live off of Earth as part of a peace treaty that no robotic life is permitted on Earth outside of an emergency. Gleisners are ambitious yet limited by their attachment to a physical body, they are actively building manned FTL craft and leaving the solar system but have not gotten as far as the third group. I don't remember the Gleisner population but it's similar to the Fleshers.

Then there are Citizens. Citizens make up the vast majority of the transhuman population numbering in the many billions. Most humans uploaded willingly once the Polises were developed and there are upload gates on Earth as part of the peace treaty allowing any Flesher to upload at will. The polises are a decentralized network of supercomputers and automated factories and robots maintaining and expanding them that is concentrated most heavily within the Earth's crust, yet, is always expanding outward to other star systems at around 0.1C.

Citizens live in different ethical and spiritual systems within their given home polis (server) but there is an agreed upon protocol that is universal to the entire network kinda of like a super advanced version of TCP/IP. The protocol mainly handles reproduction between citizens and prevents anyone from wantonly creating sentient life or abusing sentient life. I'll leave the details out because the book explains it way better than I do and is worth a read!

Citizens can also live independently of the polises and set off into space with a modest (server) of their own, although, very few do. I really fell in love with this story when I read it because none of the transhumans in the book are misanthropes who just goof of all day pursuing endless hedonism and fantasy. The book makes a point that some Citizens tried this initially and after a few decades or centuries either committed suicide or got board and started doing other things.

Greg Egan is very clearly a humanist, so there's philosophical bias, but I tend to agree, the human condition is not fit for endless hedonist escapism and we won't enjoy it forever even if a little bit of it here or there can be useful and healthy. Instead, Citizens generally spend their time making art, doing science, discussing philosophy, falling in love with each other, and overall living an enlightened existence compared to how most of us live today. Mind uploading is used as an enhancement to the human condition not a hindrance of it.

Sincerely, reading this book is what convinced me of transhumanism years ago. I want to live in a polis one day and do my part to help our species through these crises if I can live long enough so that we can all peacefully grow. Although, I must admit after learning more about ecology and coming to value it; there is something very appealing about being a Flesher for a few centuries too. It would be really cool to just become a mermaid person or something and swim around the oceans in mindful bliss for a while. Something that all the transhumans value is a connection to the physical universe. Whether that be living in it directly like a Flesher or a Gleisner, or, by observing it by proxy with scientific probes like a Citizen and on occasion fabricating a temporary robotic body to explore with.

From Greg Egan's Website for anyone interested in the book ૮ ˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶ ა

https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

In 2975, the orphan Yatima is grown from a randomly mutated digital mind seed in the conceptory of Konishi polis. Yatima explores the Coalition of Polises, the network of computers where most life in the solar system now resides, and joins a friend, Inoshiro, to borrow an abandoned robot body and meet a thriving community of “fleshers” in the enclave of Atlanta.

Twenty-one years later, news arrives from a lunar observatory: gravitational waves from Lac G-1, a nearby pair of neutron stars, show that the Earth is about to be bathed in a gamma-ray flash created by the stars’ collision – an event that was not expected to take place for seven million years. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Atlanta to try to warn the fleshers, but meet suspicion and disbelief. Some lives are saved, but the Earth is ravaged.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the survivors resolve to discover the cause of the neutron stars’ premature collision, and they launch a thousand polises into interstellar space in search of answers. This diaspora eventually reaches a planet subtly transformed to encode a message from an older group of travellers: a greater danger than Lac G-1 is imminent, and the only escape route leads beyond the visible universe.

Since you mentioned my discussion helped inspired this post only felt I should respond. First, sounds like a stellar book, the kind I'd have loved to read back when I still had an attention span before the internet ruined me. Second sounds like it makes the mistake of making mind uploading out to be a sureshot way to immortality for the individual being "uploaded" - I'm still of the believe most forms of so-called mind uploading only creates a clone and the first person actually dies while leaving a new person who just happens to be a duplicate behind. Of course, I do believe there are ways around this where a person's mind can be digitized while the original individual actually gets to live to enjoy their new uploaded existence instead of just dying with a clone behind, but that's a different discussion (you're probably already aware of the concept though - just think ship of Theseus).

I think long term our species will see a differentiation into groups closely resembling this, but with the caveat that I think there'll be a LOT more blurring of such groupings than imagined in this setting. I think real world "fleshers" whether fully organic or cyborgs will "jack in," as the 90's sci-fi cyberpunk kids used to say, into the "citizens'" servers/polises Matrix-style to play games, meet someone online, or any other reason, but still dip back out into their fleshy body minutes or hours later. I think "gleisners" will often times also go into the citizens' domain, but just as often kind of pull a reverse-cyborg and have a fleshy bioprinted organic part incorporated into their structure if it makes sense - no telling if technology will be able to make a sensor-dense taste receptor both as compact and as effective as our tongues, never mind a genetically enhanced tongue (really depends on the limits of non-organic nanotechnology really). And I think citizens will download back into both gleisner robotic bodies or mostly/partially organic flesher bodies. I could be wrong, but I think there will be so much blurring and back and forth between these three types that we'll be hard pressed to call them distinct groups at times. You could be Gleisner one day, Citizen that night, and Flesher that morning, and it won't even be considered uncommon to do that. It will all depend on your needs and plans at that moment.

But I do like that the uploaded members of that society aren't just in their god simulator videogame 24/7 while being cut off from each other. This book, will not quite what I hope/envision for the future, is much closer to it than most science fiction, and what most FIVR fans are dreaming of. I'd love to spend the day being Spider-Man or Batman in a SAO-styled FDVR experience, but I'd still want to come back to the real world for say spending holidays with my flesh and blood (or artificial robotic bodied if we live to see it) family. So I think back and forth between having bodies and not having bodies and all will be pretty common. Plus, if BCIs and genetic therapies and other technologies expand our minds enough, we might be able to exist and function in the real world and the virtual in the same time just as easily. Imagine operating from multiple bodies in different locations both in irl and vr at once. Future might be that trippy.




Edit: Was linked here from the chat so felt I should respond to the post - but thinking about it now I feel it's only fair to also stay on topic and reply on said topic. I don't see BCI SAO/Matrix FIVR happening for decades - maybe the 2060s at the earliest. I put it at such a far date because right now invasive BCIs are treated as a medical technology only, and medtech goes on a slower route to fruition because of all the testing that needs to happen. And even the 2060s is me being very generous frankly. We'll have AGI-enabled AR/MR/VR contact lenses loooooong before BCIs are implanting worlds in our heads. Nevermind we're just now seeing fully blind people seeing the blotchiest-barely better than nothing patches of "something's over in that direction I think" level of detail from BCIs used to put pictures in your head. Because long before we get BCI VR, the tech will be used for the much more worthwhile goal of giving sight to people who can't see otherwise. And like I said, it's very early days there.