Reality of the Virtual

Wednesday, April 2, 2014


 Virtual Reality
Jason Silva explores how the virtual world and the real world will increasingly become indistinct in the not-to-distant future in his latest Shot of Awe.




In the future reality will increasingly be a relative term.  Increasingly the real and the virtual are becoming intertwined.  Jason Silva explores this idea in his latest Shots of Awe video.

The long promise of immersive virtual reality is starting to materialize through the technologies developed by Occulus Rift and others.  Facebook's recent acquisition of the VR headset maker has opened up a lot of speculation on what the future entanglement of social media with virtual reality may yield.



Ultra-realistic computer graphics are now common to major films and television and will soon, through their exponential progress be available in  goggles, glasses and contact lenses bringing virtual spaces directly to you.

"The dream is real when you're in it," quotes Silva from Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Augmented reality is also going to alter how what we perceive reality to be. The short film Sight for instance, showed a man in an essentially empty room transform what he saw into an immersive and interactive virtual environment.

augmented reality virtual environment


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Looking out further, Ray Kurzeil wrote of in The Singularity Is Near, that virtual reality will be possible via nanobots in our own brains.  "You got 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside," he told Big Think. "We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, there would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet and they also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system."

Kurzweil has also told of John Storrs Hall's idea of foglets, nanobots that serve as a utility fog, transforming as a coordinated robot cloud to objects and shapes as required.  For instance in virtual conference calls, the foglets may take the shapes of the remote participants in your work space.

"I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have."


Quoting John Perry Barlow: "I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'"

According to Silva, in the future "We may suffer from relativity sickness the way they suffer from ADD today." With virtual reality taking on many forms, there is little doubt it will be a big part of our future.



SOURCE  Shots of Awe

By 33rd SquareEmbed

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