Virtual Reality at GDC 2008

Retro consoles classic consoles and retro gaming at Retrohead at www.retrohead.co.uk. I have done some hard research into what went on at GDC 2008 and...what? Oh, well, I looked at the write ups in the March editions of several magazines...thats what I said wasn't it? Hard research! So as I was saying...GDC 2008...the place where game developers the world over converge to show off their skills to try and get that elusive exposure finished this past February and whilst it appears it was a mute affair there was one piece that caught my eye. A speech from the respected Ray Kurzweil. Ray is an inventor and futurist and has worked very closely with the likes of Bill Gates. If you want to know more about him just Wikipedia him up and their is a wealth of information. His speech was a lengthy one but there was one particular part that caught my eye;

Ray said "....we are going to spend more and more of our time in virtual reality environments, and eventually we will be fully independent of real reality. The barrier to this next step is full-immersion gaming....The fear has always been that someone immersed in a virtual reality is going to forget about real reality..."

This small point got me thinking because this is something that I along with many other people have been thinking about for years. It even follows on from a previous 'One for the road' about Nintendo and where gaming is heading in terms of originality.

Could gaming turn into a real virtual reality where everything in that world can be affected, could you essentially get into a fist fight with some mob gangster or dodge real time bullets (naturally I would not expect to die from one). But how far could this go?....and this is something I have discussed before. Could we be so satisfied with our virtual reality lives that we never leave the game-space? Have a piss pipe to piss in, a conveyer belt for food intake etc etc. Would we need to do anything again? It sounds highly far fetched and I am assuming here that this would not be a relity for many many years to come but have a think, in years to come would a virtual world become so much of a better option that we become accustomed to that way of living. If that was the case surely a piss pipe or food conveyer belt would just be an extension of that idea. The virtual world might sound a lonely place now but with sites like second life having millions of pounds/dollars being spent on it...real money for virtual items...is that not a first step towards this world anyway? Hell...your in the virtual world and you fancy ordering some goods, speak to the bloke down the road and he can order it for you..pay him some virtual cash that is wired to your real world bank card, go down the road some more, slag off the local scum and run away to your virtual home. There you find your virtual wife who is in fact only upstairs on her virtual machine in the real world talking to you asking why you have been out fighting again. Are you still with me?

For that to happen the virtual reality world would have to be really good. For the first 10 -30 experimental years it would be a bit naff. A bit like gaming when the Atari 7600 was around...good at the time..but look where gaming has come in 20 years! If virtual reality started naff on a consumer scale, imagine what might happen in the first 20 years and then another 20 years after that.

I dont know if we would have piss pipes to be fair, but certainly virtual reality could be something out of this world and it only takes a little imagination at what you could do with it. Then again, films like the Matrix can further that imagination...instead of taking the films real ending, replace it with this one...the Matrix is actually a gaming network of the future when the human race becomes wholly set up in this virtual world...and everyone forgets that it is virtual reality. That might sound madness but just think....