This will be the next great thing, maybe bigger then the Internet. The possibilities for Internet porn are endless... LOL!

Humans are big fans of communication, look at telephones, cell phones the Internet, read God Debris. This Technology is going to allow the creation of Lucid world, where people will have the ability to do anything they can do or feel in reality, except smell and taste from the comforts of their own homes, even sex. You will be able to walk virtual malls to try on clothes, you will be able to physically fight if you like. Reporters will be able to save an actual sensory recording of the event they are watching so you can live it too. This is going to be an amazing transcending technology.

The sex part is what worries me most though. So much of what humans do on a day-to-day basis is for sex. If you make sex this easy to attain, there will be almost no reason for many people to ever unplug. People may one day even be able to opt to abandon reality and hook up to the net forever like the Matrix. This technology is going to change the world on a greater scale then the Internet did. I can't think of a human invention that is so likely to change so many aspects of human life. This is what I have been mulling over the last few days.

*UPDATE* 5/1/04 I finally took the time to expand this:

Tomorrow's Brave New Reality

By Art Jannicelli

Today we are witnessing the dawn of the next economic revolution. The evolution to a virtual economy based on a virtual sensory interactive reality. Today it exists in a very primitive form in Internet computer games such as Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Never Winter Nights, etc. They are primitive in the sense they only include the senses of sight and hearing. In that sense they are not fully immersive and therefore just games. However, they do offer a preview of the potential of a truly immersive reality might exist with real players.

In these games human players must pay a subscription fee for access to the virtual game world. A good number of these people also buy in game (virtual) items with their own money from the real economy. This has become a multi-million dollar Industry and is just a glimpse of the potential profit that could be made in a fully immersive virtual reality.

Imagine a fully immersive virtual interactive reality one in which people can touch, see, hear, smell and taste a reality outside their own. This is not as far off as you might think. MIT and the University of London have already accomplished a limited degree of real time touch simulation over the Internet. Pornographers are already selling devices to attach to the genitals that are controlled remotely over the Internet to simulate sex and produce an orgasm. Smell technology has been around for years, although, without a fully immersive environment it has had no viable commercial applications. While currently there is no such thing as virtual taste, the fact that the experience of taste is largely based on the sense of smell means it will not be that difficult to develop. Obviously, we have already nearly perfected digital reproduction of sound. Visually, graphic animation is becoming more difficult to differentiate from reality with the release of the latest block buster movies and computer games, Final Fantasy, Everquest 2, Farcry, Matrix 3, etc. The ability to be fully immersed in an alternate reality will be the end of “just a game”.

At the dawning of the possibility for the limitless creation of alternative human realities, it is important to try and recognize what defines reality from virtual reality. If you are immersed in a world where all of your senses tell you, your conscious and not just playing on your computer, what makes it different from the real world?

Human interaction perhaps? Nope, the primitive Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) of today have at least 2 million players worldwide. With the spread of broadband Internet technology and more immersive MMOG's this population will only increase.

Beyond this core of game enthusiasts who else would want to invest their lives in just a game, even if it seems real? It is because it is not real that will hook people. Consider the difference between dreams and reality. MMOG's are dream worlds. In a dream you can feel pleasure, and sometimes you can consciously control a dream. While you can experience true terror and fear in a dream you can never actually be physically hurt. In the real world you have relatively much less control over your life (you didn't choose your parents or your luck), and the possibility for pain is real and constant, while opportunities of pleasure are as finite as the limitations placed upon your life. What this comes down to is a choice, between a god like euphoric existence, versus one of pain and hardship. This will ultimately be what drives up subscribers into the hundreds of millions and then billions as the technology becomes available outside the first world economies. Not only does this choice make sense for the hedonistic individual it is also very productive for capitalism.

With the rise of Gloablization since the beginning of the 1980's global profit taking has been shifting from wealth creation (value added surplus) to wealth transfer (rent seeking). Current technical innovation to improve the economies of scale has become prohibitively expensive; to the point the private sector is utterly dependent on subsidy. As a result wealth creation is no longer the preferred means of profit taking. Rather wealth transfer in the form of finance, Intellectual Property, gambling, pornography, pharmaceuticals, and the black market have become the most important profit taking sectors because they are not subject to economies of scale. Their value is determined by their legal or illegal status of property rights.

A virtual world is also not subject to economies of scale. While it is critical for the mass adoption of this product that it be priced to increase market share—rather then what the market will bear—there is tremendous potential for wealth transfer opportunities. First people will have to buy online money for online materialism in the form of custom avatars, clothing, homes, transport, and any special abilities. Additionally, the opportunity experiences will be limitless but not without a price. Consider what some people might pay to train with Bruce Lee. Or perhaps just have sex with celebrities living or dead. A person would only be limited in their experience by their own imagination and wallet. Any of these options have no real value, and have no marginal costs. They exist only as intellectual property, whose value is derived by property law. Therefore the revenue from these online consumers is virtually limitless. This materialist world would be much better environmentally then mass consumerism in reality. This Brave New Reality will enable Capitalism to continue by giving the economy a whole new massive virtual market that is not limited by space.

One large hurdle for this new economy to take hold will be bandwidth costs. Current MMOG's function at acceptable levels of performance on a standard 56.6k dialup modem connection. Obviously, a fully immersive environment will require a broadband connection. This is becoming readily available to consumers. Bandwidth is a natural monopoly and is priced on what the market will bare. So before immersive realities become a mainstream product this must be changed. This is already underway. It is well known that the online pornography industry is by far the largest presence on the Internet. For pornographers interaction is their product of value added surplus, this requires a great deal of bandwidth. If any online industry can overcome the limitations of high bandwidth costs it will be this one. Additionally, thy will also be one of the primary investors in fully immersive technology as it is the next progression in pornography.

Some people might think this technology has severe possible societal ramifications. However, due to its inherent technical nature naysayers will under estimate its potential in the same way the Internet was under estimated. By the time the moral implications become apparent it will already be to late as it is now to expunge the negative aspects of the system.

This Brave New Reality is at our doorstep and there is nothing stopping it from going mainstream by 2010. It is for this reason it is important to consider the potential of it today.

Further Research:

A fundamental problem in the social sciences is the inability to create a test or control group society. It is logistically and morally impossible. However, MMOG's might be a way to overcome this problem. MMOG's have economies and human actors. It might be possible to then create virtual realities in which the actors interact naturally in this virtual world to study the effects of various changes to the rules of this reality. This would allow social science to surpass the need to assume actor responses; instead it could actually make quantifiable measurements of actual subjects. The anonymous nature of the Internet would also easily allow for blind testing.