About a month ago, the trailer for Ready Player One came out. It's based on a book of the same name, and it's essentially about a world where humanity spends the vast majority of its time in a virtual world called Oasis because there's nothing left to see in the real world. The whole 'virtual world' thing has always intrigued me, and while I'm too optimistic to think that a scenario where "there's nothing left" is possible, I definitely have imagined such a scenario.
But regardless, I think almost everyone will agree that there are a lot of things needed to happen before any kind of virtual world that is even remotely interesting, let alone actually captivating, is developed. A lot of current VR environments are stifled by the lack of computing power, and the fact that there's no mature ecosystem for VR development.
I think these are the most important things necessary for creating Virtual Worlds:
1. Enough Performance to make it Virtually Indistinguishable from Real Life
There's a reason that movies that have too much CGI look tacky, and aren't as enjoyable as movies that have minimal CGI: Humans are incredible at distinguishing the real from the non-real. I mean obviously, human eyes have adapted to the real world.So of course they are great at pointing out things that aren't real.
Now, obviously, in a Virtual World, we know, and are expecting the world to not be real. But another aspect of vision is the fact that we see everything with a consistent speed. There are no "frame drops" in real life. No "slowdowns". So the Virtual World will have to have as close to 100% framerate consistency as possible.
Currently, the consensus is that a framerate of 90-120FPS and a resolution of 2K per eye is at the minimum required for a comfortable experience. Modern PCs have just now begun to deliver that kind of Performance. Laptops and phones will take years more to support that kind of performance.
2. A Wireless Ecosystem of Accessories, Alternative devices and other things
Now, if we truly want to be in a Virtual World, a single VR headset isn't going to cut it. Humans have multiple senses, and so we have to have input for all the senses. So there will a need for devices for emulating smell, touch and sound. Interestingly, there's no RGB value for smell. Smell is too diverse for it to have a scale, or a unique value that represents a certain smell. So there will be an Ecosystem of devices that come together to give you that experience.
Obviously, this whole ecosystem will need to be wireless. Wired devices will be cumbersome and inconvenient(especially when the no of devices you are interacting with increases).
3.Good Developer Resources
Actually making a Virtual World that is bigger than just your own room is a very hard thing to do. obviously, there will be smaller,more limited worlds in the beginning( some of these already exist today); which in turn will need a good,consistent API and a good SDK to implement that API. Also, if you truly want to have people from multiple platforms on a single world, you will need for there to be collaboration, and development of good resources for those starting out.
4. A way to transmit human emotion and context
This is perhaps the most important point, and the point where some massive developments have taken place recently.
This is the thing that made me write this post
So Cloud Emperium, the Developer of Star Citizen, a very famous multiplayer space game that is in beta, announced that it will track the player's facial expressions in real-time and duplicate it on the character's face in real time. The tech works on consumer webcams, even those that record only at 30fps.There's no reason this couldn't be used in a Virtual World.
This is the MOST IMPORTANT thing needed to make Virtual Worlds
The biggest problem with Virtual Worlds, is that the only form of communication is text, or voice chat. And while that is better than say, messaging your friend, it still sometimes misses the context of what you say.
But if your friend could know your facial expression, among with other things, he could understand the context of what you're saying.
Facial expression, coupled with a view of the in-game environment, is the best way to let someone know the context in which the conversation is going on.
This is HUGE. When you know context, your relationship with the other person changes significantly. This means that people will make much better relationships in the Virtual World than they do on other social media.Such relations will have much more empathy, much more context. And obviously, this will make people less aggressive, and more peaceful.
These are the things that I believe are necessary to make Virtual Worlds a reality.Until then, they will continue to be unintuitive and "contrived".
Edit:
Removed the link to the Ready Player One trailer, because the eSteem app, for some reason converts into a YouTube embed, which screws up the formatting.
Thanks for reading the post. Please comment about your thoughts on Virtual Worlds below. If you liked the post, please follow me for more content like this :-)
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Sources
http://mashable.com/2017/08/25/star-citizen-facial-animation-real-time-faceware/#H71djydCFkq3
Header Image and second image from pixabay. Third Image from Mashable.