As it turns out, "Avatars Do It In Cyberspace", a bumper sticker I spotted last week on a car near my San Francisco apartment which then inspired a massive Second Life-driven bumper sticker meme, has a long history that goes back around 15 years. (Which in Internet time, is well over a century.) This news comes to me from my friend T.L. Taylor, a renowned virtual world/gaming academic. She also got the same bumper sticker at a conference called Earth to Avatars, in 1996. Yes, the desire for an immersive online virtual world goes back that far.
T.L. tells me more about the conference:
"[I]t was Bruce Damer's big event. Looking back on it was pretty amazing both for the range of people there and the issues that got discussed." T.L. picked up the bumper sticker and a related software disk for Black Sun, a very early virtual world. "I remember it well. It was a very exciting time for not just virtual worlds but it was also that 90s mix of VR, cyberpunk, the crazy transhumanists, etc. etc." I remember that era fairly well too, and the first media hype wave for virtual reality. Question is, how much closer are we to realizing those early visions, or are we generally moving away from them?
Photo courtesy T.L. Taylor.
Arguably the oldest form of immersive virtual reality predates our evolution to humans and is common to most mammals. We call it dreaming.
I don't think the demand for shared immersive VR has diminished. It may be temporarily eclipsed by other technologies, simply because the hardware for immersive VR isn't advancing as fast as we might hope, and the interface issues are not trivial.
But look at our popular entertainment. Look at the wild success of the smash hit movie "Avatar". The craving is still there. It's just that the tech is still too expensive/bulky/bizarre to deliver. Yet.
Just one breakthrough in communicating with the human sensory system in an inexpensive, non-intrusive fashion might be enough to push it into the mainstream.
And if the tech taps into our brains' existing "VR" hardwiring, we might not even need to be awake to enjoy the ride
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Wednesday, May 04, 2011 at 07:32 AM