Good afternoon,
I recently saw (again) a movie I very much like called The 13th Floor, in which the characters are faced with the question: what is real? Turns out that there's a whole lot of virtual reality going on.
Now VR has been in visual sci-fi, i.e., television, movies, animation, etc., for about a decade or more. Star Trek TNG brought it to the fore with the Holodeck.
It came through clear as a desert full moon in The Matrix.
James P. Hogan also wrote a book called Realtime Interrupt in which a guy is trapped in a VR so realistic that it takes him quite awhile to realize it.
But the most realistic to me was The 13th Floor.
I'm wondering how close we are to this sort of thing. I could think of no better place to ask than here.
Regards,
Bal
not even remotely close
Hi Bal,
I haven't seen the movie, but now it's on my list :-]
Virtual reality real enough to be confused for, well, reality, is far enough off that it's impossible to say how soon it enters the realm of possibility.
To illustrate my point, just take a walk outside. Examine something up close. A puddle, or a clump of grass, or a spot of bark on a tree. You will see an amazing amount of detail, little things you don't normally notice. If they were absent, however, you'd notice pretty quickly. Or go the opposite route and go to a scenic view with visibility of fifty miles or so. Take binoculars and try to imagine how much effort would need to go into simulating one single scene like that, not to mention the almost infinite amount of similar scenes you'd have to be able to render to create a VR that might be confused with our own.
Realistic VR is a scaling problem. Modern graphics simulations are limited in processing power, and details = processing power. Our best video games look quite realistic on a superficial level but you'd still never confuse them for reality, given the opportunity to examine things close up. The best VR today looks great because it takes as many shortcuts as it can get away with.