Brian's Brain

Speaking of science fiction, now's as good a time as any for me to get another long-planned 'to blog about' topic off my list. I'm partway through a sci fi classic called Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson. Like William Gibson's Neuromancer, from whence came the term cyberspace, Snow Crash has proven to be a particularly prescient predictor and influencer of future events and innovations. Its description of the metaverse online community, for example, had a great effect on Microsoft's J Allard (who adopted Hiro Protagonist, the name of one of the book's main characters, as his online moniker) as he and others on his team brainstormed and implemented what would eventually become Xbox Live. And Snow Crash's inspiration is equally evident when you look at online virtual worlds and MMORPGs, in factors such as the now-commonplace virtual reality adoption of the Sanskrit word avatar. Ironically, just as Neuromancer influenced Microsoft, its literary kindred spirit Snow Crash may have been equally influential on Microsoft's competitor, Sony, in guiding the development of the company's coming-soon PlayStation Home portal.

Perhaps the most well known virtual world, and probably the most controversial one, is Second Life, which my cohort Ann Steffora Mutschler has also written about on occasion. To date, I've amassed a nearly two-year pile of articles (and cyber-pile of RSS feeds) on the topic of virtual worlds, and I even briefly tried out Second Life's service. My avatar's name is Highand Lowe (get it?), although I confess I haven't logged on to Second Life in more than a year. And I'm seemingly not the exception in this regard; while the company regularly touts its millions of registered users, it's more subdued (but over time has been forced by investors and others to be more upfront) about the fact that most of those registrations reflect:

1. People who, like me, tried the service once or a few times but haven't been back, or
2. Visit Second Life only occasionally and briefly, and/or
3. Have multiple registered avatars that correspond to a single meatspace counterpart.

While virtual worlds regularly get showcased in events such as the Intel Developer Forum, reality (as Wired scathingly pointed out last summer...how quickly one publication's attitude changes in nine months, huh?) doesn't match the hype. Yet. That one word is why I continue to follow virtual worlds and the technology behind them as closely as I do, even though as my non-participation suggests, I don't find them personally compelling. Frankly, in fact, I find them pretty repelling.

Half of the reason for my yet (or, if you prefer, eventually) prediction is that the compelling realism of virtual worlds is currently constrained by technical limitations...limitations which are rapidly in the process of being surmounted. Why, after all, do you think Intel's so hot on the concept, both for the clients at the edges of the network and at the datacenter hub? Increasingly powerful and power consumption-skimpy general-purpose processing engines? Check. High-performance rendering and pixel-pushing graphics (and physics) specialized processing engines? Check. Head-mounted displays? They've been at SID for years, and they're getting lighter, smaller, higher-resolution and otherwise more appealing all the time.

Anyway, forget about glasses...how about contact lenses? What else? Ubiquitous wireless broadband? WiMAX is already here, with LTE nipping on its heels. Haptic interfaces? New breakthroughs were announced just this week. How about brainwave-sensing and –responding interfaces? Ditto. You might think I'm a bit silly in making these observations and predictions. To which I'll respond with Amara's Law:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Even if the technology capability exists to implement a particular concept, of course, that doesn't mean that concept will actually be implemented or, if it is, that it'll be widely adopted. However, with virtual worlds, I (unfortunately) don't anticipate that demand will be a problem. Why?

Human beings, like many if not all creatures, seem to have a natural compulsion to intoxicate themselves in striving to escape the un-pleasurable aspects of real life and instead flee (albeit temporarily) to a seemingly 'better' alternative. We cling to what feels good, and we push away what feels bad...not realizing, as we do so, that this grasping and aversion is at the root of our suffering...but I digress. Yes, I'm taking you down a blue pill/red pill Matrix scenario here.

People are already fleeing to virtual worlds (with dire consequences), even in their imperfect states, and in spite of the fact that, as is the case with chat rooms, USENET groups, and other artifacts of cyberspace, most if not all cyber-worlds seem to rapidly degrade to anarchistic real world look-alikes. Heck, some scholars hypothesize that there's a statistically significant possibility that we already exist in a virtual world (here's more and even more on the topic...yep, Matrix again). Why wouldn't people flee to them more often, and more people flee to them, as they become more compelling over time and technology evolution?

Let me be very clear; as is the case with any gray-zone topic (which, come to think of it, encompasses all topics), virtual worlds aren't all-bad. After all, I wrote about virtual music collaboration just last fall, a concept that Intel's Paul Otellini also showcased in his Consumer Electronics Show keynote two months ago. Virtual reality is also useful in treating phantom limb pain, and in helping victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. But what I'm focusing on here is the wholesale disconnection-from-reality of a society that's already well along that path. Believe me, this is not a future prediction that I'm particularly fond of. But nonetheless, I can't deny its high likelihood of coming to pass. Shades of Huxley's soma...

Hey, what can I say; as my bio has stated from day 1 of my EDN career:

Electronics and its impact on society (both positive and negative) fascinates me. Trends in the electronics industry are at the core of today's Information Age. Innovations based on technical, economic, and moral concerns will ensure a higher quality of life for all humans and improve our environment. Engineering, a unique blend of the scientist's theoretical creativity and the tangible reality of the marketplace, is the place where these breakthroughs will occur.

Readers, what do you think of my theories on this topic?

p.s...In closing, and still on the science fiction theme, check out the '20 Things You Didn’t Know About... ' column from Discover Magazine's February edition. Great stuff!

Followup: within 2 hours of publishing this particular writeup, I received a thorough and thought-provoking response from Lillie Yiyuan. Thank you very much, Lillie! And for the record, I don't at all underestimate the theraputic and inspirational opportunities for exploring, in a virtual environment, concepts and ideas that wouldn't be possible (for a variety of reasons) in 'meatspace'. The root of my concern is the strong temptation for virtual world participants, as a result of the freedom they experience in Second Life or a similar metaverse, to consequently and inappropriately 'break' from the real world.