trippenbach
tanith6227
rustedangel
Pale Horse
quote: “Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed
projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies
could use the contact lenses to completely immerse
players in a virtual world without restricting their
range of motion. And for communications, people on the
go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display
screen that only they would be able to see.”
For those of us still still phrasing questions in the Future Tense, this is very ineteresting.
Update - quote: “let’s face it: once people can get online without even having to get out of bed, they’ll NEVER log off.”
Is Tanith on the money? That’s up to you to decide, but William Gibson agrees.
Filed under: Games, Tech | Tagged: cyberpunk, rabbits, technology, video games, william gibson
Wow, cool beans. I gues the bext step is to see how the poor bunnies do after wearing the lenses for 20 hours, because let’s face it: once people can get online without even having to get out of bed, they’ll NEVER log off. Being a shut-in will be easier than ever.
well spotted. post updated just for Tanith.
Negative. If you can get online without getting out of bed, that just means you can spend your time in Virtual Reality. Big whoop. We already have that, and we have plenty of people who stay online all the time.
The real value isn’t in VR - it’s in AR: Augmented Reality. You wear the contacts when you get out of bed, and they feed you a stream of contextual information based on what you’re looking at. Car broke down? Access the web from your contact lens and it’ll overlay an engine schematic and repair instructions over your actual field of view, so you can fix it better. Looking up and down the street? Maybe you can see people as their avatars “I’m the one with the pink gorilla on my shoulder.” Go to a conference and you’ll see links to people’s LinkedIn profiles hovering over their heads like WoW action points. There won’t even be a computer at your desk; why bother with a screen and a PC physically located in your workspace when you can see your data floating in the air above it? This is going to happen . . . Apparently this is a good book on the subject. (That link, by the way, is the full text of the Hugo Award-winning book; the author is a great believer in the global data commons. Good thing I didn’t buy it at teh bookstore yesterday!)
Virtual Light, anyone?
trippenbach makes some interesting (and cool!) observations, but I disagree somewhat. Sure you can have these wildly useful contacts that give you all this information as you’re moving around, but if they’re as awesome as all that … why move around at all?
Why get out of bed and drive my car to work, if I can do my job no matter where I am? Why bother meeting people at the office or on the street when I can attend a virtual board meeting or cruise down to a virtual coffee shop and chat with thousands? Why go to a friend’s house to hang out if we can all just log in to our favourite MMO and play together? Why go out to a store when I can just go online and have food, clothing and luxuries delivered to my home?
“Those aren’t real human interactions!” you might say, to which I respond, “bollocks”. They aren’t PHYSICAL interactions, but physical proximity isn’t a prerequsite to human interaction. As wowdetox demonstrates, there are already thousands of people who prefer their virtual lives to their real ones. If technology makes it easy to live like that, I would expect the number of people who do so to increase.
Sure. I have no doubt that the proportion of our collective lives lived in virtual spaces is going to increase. But there are two significant advantages to physicality. The first is bandwith, the second is realism.
First, bandwith. I was at a conference yesterday where I met a guy from IBM. Among other things, he was telling the audience how they have a virtual world at IBM now, behind the firewall, where everyone from the company can get together. They can do all sorts of things there like have presentations and meetings. Why do they do this? Because the virtual world gives you more communications bandwith. Let’s compare an avatar meeting in a virtual conference room to a conference call. On the conference call, everyone sits at their desks or around meeting tables, keeping quiet while people ring in. It’s a bit of a mess - everyone is invisible.
In the virtual conference room, the avatar chairing stands at the front. People file in and sit down. Wait - why do they do that?? Avatars’ legs don’t get tired! But the virtual world allows people to use body language .
We are social primates, capable of communicating in very high bandwith to each other. Every quaver of voice, shift in position, fold of cloth, tendril of hair, flick of eye, sigh - all this adds up to a very precise gestalt impression of the person we’re communicating with, if in person. At the moment, we can’t replicate that with /emote commands.
Eventually, of course, we will - but this brings us to the realism part. In Star Trek: Generations, (WARNING: geek alert) there’s a bit where captain Picard enters this wierd space-time singularity string thing and finds Captain Kirk of the original enterprise, riding his horse. Picard tells Kirk he’s living in a simulation. Kirk gallops off, jumps over a ditch on his horse, and rides back to Picard. “Every time I did that, I was scared,” says Kirk. “Now, I felt nothing.” Reality bites. That’s why we like it.
Besides, if you’re staying in bed and just getting the virtual part, you’re only getting half the experience! Getting out into the real world and getting the virtual layered on top of it is twice the fun.
“Besides, if you’re staying in bed and just getting the virtual part, you’re only getting half the experience! Getting out into the real world and getting the virtual layered on top of it is twice the fun.”
That’s entirely true and I agree with you.
It’s also beside the point I was making, which is: people are already using technology as a replacement for physical interactions, whether it’s the WoW addict who’s only friends are his guildmates, or the shut-in who has food delivered to his house by calling the grocery store or ordering online. As the tools to do this improve and bandwidth and realism increase, we’ll start seeing more of this kind of behaviour. Hence my “people will never log off” comment.
Also: your choice of Star Trek film is interesting, because the whole premise of the movie is that there’s a guy who’s willing to do anything to exchange his “real” life for an entirely virtual one.
quote: “Getting out into the real world and getting the virtual layered on top of it is twice the fun.”
It seems to me that this is the crucial point. The argument shouldn’t be about the relative merits of real versus virtual interaction, but about how much the one has replaced the other.
…or, more accurately, how much the two are blurring together, which is where Gibson makes his best cyberpunk points on the second page of that interview.
Rather than view this as a conflict of the one interaction mode against the other, I prefer to look at it in the post-human sense; how much better can we make face communication with the addition of “virtual light?” Of course, this will also brutally increase the scale of the “income gap” between the connected and the unconnected.
…I suppose I’ll refer everyone to the refugee crisis is GitS 2nd Gig…
“refugee crisis is GitS 2nd Gig…”
What?
The second season of the Ghost in the Shell television show (the “2nd Gig”
is focused on a refugeee crisis in Japan.
Click here for more an episode-by-episode synopsis.
You’d like it; it’s an examination of a revolution where basically everyone has an e-brain connection to the guy leading the movement. On the surface this looks like perhaps the first “true” revolution… except that the leader is still vulnerable to being manipulated and his network to being jammed.
It’s actually a reverse example of what we’re talking about; there is a lot of potential for even shirow-level e-brains to be manipulated in almost exactly yhe same way governments currently pull the strings of third world revolutionaries.
Still, it’s a compelling examination of the topic. Both seasons of “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” are excellent, and required-viewing for cyberpunk fans.
Also: thanks to tripp for the link to Rainbow’s End. I’m working through it and so far it’s pretty interesting!
I just went to the bookstore and bought a copy, after all - I don’t want to read this on my laptop!
I just printed it out at work. If I end up enjoying it enough that I want it on my bookshelf, I’ll pop out and buy it. But if he’s giving it away, I’ll take it - you certainly can’t argue with the price.
It comes down to format: I like having a paperback, ’cause it’s portable.
If I could get this on an iPhone, I might just do that instead.
It’s true that the version I’ve got won’t fit in a Murse. But since I wouldn’t be caught dead with one of those anyway, I’m fine with a document that fits in my backpack.
Careful, I’m really good at planting stuff on corpses.
Ding!
You fool. Do you seriously believe that I will suffer you to be left behind when I leave this world?
ah, yes, how foolish of me.
I’ve noticed Tanith’s clever lack of a profile picture. Is this a clever comment on modern society, anonymity, and the internet - or has he just not gotten around to it?
Cubes and Elites want to know!
P