Virtual Reality now & beyond 2030
The future of Electronic Virtual Realities
An afternoon with techn0shaman & VRexperts
techn0shaman at Toronto VR Games circa 2017 in Kensington Market
2000-2020
It’s the year 2016 and Electronic virtual universe’s have been around for around a decade now. When we entered into the 3rd millennium[yr2000], a “big bang” of the internet took place, that propelled us forward into a future of connected devices, available to the general population, and not limited to the monetary elite. This created a global holographic cybernetic mind known as the internet.
Since then, people from many different communities and all parts of the Earth have created 3D physical spaces on the web for everyone to access. Today’s head mounted display devices, [like the Oculus Rift & HTC Vive] offer a highly immersive way to experience, these places, if you have a powerful enough GPU [graphics processing unit].
These head mounted displays can trick your biological senses into thinking you are in a realm created by the imagination, with little to no input/output of raw material from the earth. Everything is written in code and then displayed to your eyes as informationally coded electrons on the screen, a universe built from light. Room scale tracking and a real metaverse coming into vision within the next few years (JanusVR is the closest representation i’ve come across so far)
I ask myself...
What does this all mean?
As technology accelerates to be better at manipulating our senses and making the experience we have in these electronic virtual worlds impossible to distinguish from non virtual space, we as a collective species will discover a secret about ourselves that we can not now see, Virtual Reality will allow us to share our dreams as vision instead of as words. It will allow us to objectify language and it will create a kind of telepathy. Dissolving boundaries between each other. It is and will be the ultimate empathy machine, creating a better world.
2021-2030
This will be the decade in which the transition from external sources of Human Machine interfacing goes inside the body, the miniaturization of computer chips, optics, ect. Will allow these virtual worlds to exist simultaneously with the human experience on the inside, along with the natural world we live in that surrounds us in everyday life. A Second layer of reality will be augmented into existence, mediated by artificial intelligence and our own imagination, you will be able to live inside your dreams, nano scale machines that travel through your bloodstream and into your nervous system which will allow feeling and experience in EVR. It is something we can only barely cognize but it will be natural. We will have multiple parallel processing units going on inside of us, potentially interfaced with a neural lace directly into the human neo cortex. A telepathy of visual language, similar to how rainforest Shamans describe their visions on a psychedelic drink called Ayahuasca from plants in the Amazon. The future is a forward escape into the past, as we approach singularity, we will find that the doorways that open before us are what will ultimately bring us all together no matter how alien, strange, and different the universe may be.
Space colonists that will be sent to Mars, and the Moon in this coming decade will be able to live in complex simulations of what life was like on Earth, never truly getting homesick, Space tourists and people that upgrade themselves with machines and the aspiration of longevity and/or human augmentation, will find it considerably easier to survive in Space with the extra dimensional layer of EVR.
2031 to infinity
Humans, Transhuman chimeras[people who have transcended biological humanism], Sentient Machine Beings, and Post Humans will be able to appear however they/we wish too, in cyber/neurospace and in naturospace. We will be able to communicate in a language that is 3-Dimensional, visual, and auditory simultaneously with our 2D languages we exhibit today. Advanced & Complex simulations and integrations of large and small scale patterns will be understood in a matrix of information that will have evolved from the internet over the period of its existence, our brains will be computing this information at a rate close to the speed of light partly in the cloud with nanomachines directly wired with the synapses and genesis of thought and partly in our hybrid DNA/molecular bio computing brains.
To extrapolate much farther than this is incredibly difficult as we are still limited to a human understanding of what all the implications of the new world will be like. I will end with this quote from: Terence McKenna
“the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see. We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture — the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not — because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.”
