Last night I had an early viewing of Ready Player One. The movie, based on the very awesome book by Ernest Cline, is a dystopian take on the future. In the book, as in the movie, no one gets on the web anymore. All of our online social interactions happen in a place called the Oasis, a massive online reality that is part World of Warcraft, part Neuromancer, and dripping in pop culture. You don’t just use VR googles in the Oasis, either. There are VR suits and even full-body rigs. You don’t just see and hear things in the Oasis, you can feel and touch things, too.
The book was ahead of its time in 2011, but what it predicted is looking more and more like what we can do today. We’re not there yet, but it might be only a few years away. The only real impediment to a virtual world like the Oasis is bandwidth. When 5G arrives and we start seeing median download speeds of 3.5 gigabits, or about 437.5 megabytes a second, maybe we will see this system start to become feasible.
If you want to see the state of virtual reality now, you can stop by Dubai VR park, which we were given a tour of before the movie started, thanks to the folks at HTC. I’ve been fairly dismissive of VR in the past, but this is a nice introduction to the VR experience. It’s surprising and a little scary how quickly you brain accepts the images in front of you. I reached out once for a railing that wasn’t there, and actually had a touch of vertigo when I was on the top of a virtual tour bus in Japan.
If you want a workout, go check out a boxing match, if for no other reason than to use something that allows you to interact with the virtual world. The “boxing gloves,” which are actually just a pair of paddles, are still years away from the gloves and bodysuits that appear in the movie. But if you can imagine your headset being connected to your friends, then you have the first insights into what Ready Player One is about.
For those of you who worry that, once again, new technology is taking people away from the real world – well, that’s what the movie is about. I did say it was dystopian.
By the way, those of you who do see the movie, keep an eye out for the Atari 2600 game called Adventure, which was first released in 1979. It plays a pivotal role in the movie and book, but it was also a real game. The graphics were horrible. The storyline was basically non-existent. The player was nothing more than a yellow box and carried what looked like an arrow for a sword. The dragons famously looked like ducks. And we loved it and wasted hours playing it long before anyone ever heard the phrase “For the Horde!”
