(This is Part 9 of a series. Go back to Part 8.)
2b. The rise of virtual reality
A look at the website Second Life will astound you. It's become far, far more than a website. It has become a new kind of reality. (There are a number of other "multi-player" virtual reality websites on the web, such as World of Warcraft, but I'm focusing on Second Life here because it seems to be the furthest along.)
In Second Life (SL) you inhabit an avatar of your choosing. It can be male or female, your choice. It can be old, young or in-between. It can be a human being or a robot of some kind or an alien lifeform. It can have any conceivable type of hairstyle you can imagine, and you can change it at will.
You might have shoes on your feet. If so, you will buy them at a virtual SL shoestore, and the shoes will not be real shoes but virtual ones that your avatar wears in SL. You can buy virtual clothes at a number of SL clothing stores, and you—as your avatar—wear those clothes until you decide you want to wear something else.
You make purchases in SL with, appropriately enough, Linden dollars, since Linden Labs is the proprietor of SL. You can buy Linden dollars outright or you can earn them within SL by selling virtual merchandise or services. And of course you can buy "real-world" items within SL, such as a book that you would liked shipped to you in the real world.
You can create, inhabit or wander through just about any type of reality you would like or can imagine. You can be snorkel diving in tropical waters, snow skiing on a mountain, flying through the sky, dancing at a 19th century ball, watching a gunfight in the old wild west, piloting a fighter plane, wandering through some futuristic landscape and so on—you get the idea. Pretty much anything you can imagine can be created or discovered in SL.
And it's only going to get even more so. Of course the resolution will increase. The avatars will get more and more lifelike—or more and more detailed in their fantasy, as the case may be. But inevitably, both the avatars and the surrounding environment will become much more finely grained, more believable, more realistic. The scenes, whatever they are—even when you're in scenes that would be impossible in real life—will steadily become more lifelike, realistic, believable.
Increasingly, people will attend concerts, shows and movies in virtual reality. The time probably isn't far off when we'll walk into a virtual bookstore, wander through stacks of virtual books, visually browsing—as we might in a real bookstore—even taking down an interesting book, opening it up and perusing it perhaps. If we buy the book, we'll be able to read it book virtually, if we wish, for instance in a virtual home.
In time, we'll be able to virtually walk through landscapes of such staggering beauty that it will take our breath away. We'll stand by waterfalls that will seem utterly real, walk through spring meadows filled with flowers, sit on the seashore and watch the sea. Virtual reality (VR) will become more and more essential for business: Not only will be buy and sell things virtually, but we'll attend meetings virtually, be hired for virtual jobs and so forth. All this happens already in VR, but these activities and others like them will take on degrees of unbelievable realism.
Moreover, our activities in VR will become increasingly complex in scope and depth, and begin to resemble the complexity and richness of real life. And that's where things to going to get really interesting.
Sooner or later there will come a point in time when it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish VR from real reality. And imagine it goes on evolving and evolving from there... The conclusion is inescapable that eventually VR will become indistinguishable from "real" reality.
At that point life will take on a whole other level of complexity that is difficult to imagine now. There will be various levels and dimensions of virtual reality, "wormholes" that take us from one reality to another, and virtual realities that evolve. Without some kind of labeling—which may or may not be trustworthy—it may become impossible to know which reality one is really in, and in particular, whether one is in "real" reality or whether one is in one or another virtual reality.
There will come a time when the practical difference between the two becomes moot, because there will be no aspect of "real" reality that cannot be duplicated eventually. Perhaps the only difference remaining will be that realities quite impossible in the "real" world will be utterly commonplace in VR.
And one last thing: There will arise lifeforms that exist only in VR, and yet they will reach a point of evolvement that we will have to call them "life," and not "life" in quotes either, but life, for real. That in turn will raise the question of what kind of "life" we humans are, and if we're not some kind of virtual reality ourselves.
Eventually that question too will become moot, as it will be accepted that life is most basically an organization of information, and that its self-arising, self-maintaining and self-replicating organization can arise and exist in all sorts of mediums—"physical," electronic, lightbeams and beyond. It may be difficult to imagine now, but beings composed of nothing but digits in a virtual reality will eventually come to be considered just as "alive" as you, me and the bird singing in the tree.
(This is the end of Part 9. Go to Part 10.)
—jim sloman, for 1.3.07
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