Okay, here’s my blog post about trying to figure out if full dive virtual reality is even possible, written in the style you requested:
Alright, so I got really into this whole “full dive VR” idea – you know, like in Sword Art Online or Ready Player One. I mean, who wouldn’t want to just completely escape into a digital world? So I started digging in, trying to see if this was something we could actually do someday.
First thing I did was just plain old Google. I started searching around, reading articles, watching videos… you know, the usual rabbit hole. I wanted to know what the biggest hurdles were.
Brain-Computer Interface
It quickly became obvious that the biggest challenge, by far, is the brain-computer interface (BCI). We’re talking about something that can read your brain signals and send signals back, perfectly, to simulate all five senses. That’s insane!
I found out we’re kind of making progress with BCIs. There are some cool things happening with controlling prosthetics with your thoughts, and even some super basic visual stuff. But it’s all incredibly primitive compared to what we’d need for full dive.
- Reading Brain Signals: We can pick up on some brain activity, like with EEG, but it’s super noisy and not very precise. It’s like trying to listen to a specific conversation across a crowded stadium.
- Writing to the Brain: This is even harder. We can stimulate the brain with things like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), but it’s very crude. It’s like poking someone with a stick instead of giving them a detailed massage.
- The current technologies is far away from the goal.
The Five Senses
Then there’s the whole sensory input thing. We’d need a way to completely hijack our senses – sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Each one of those is a monumental task on its own.
- We use vr glasses to slove the vision problem.
- For sound, we just put on the headphones, and that all.
- Simulating touch realistically would require incredibly precise control over pressure, temperature, and texture, all over your body.
- As the smell and taste, it is far away to reach, we still need to learn more about the brain.
I looked into some haptic suits that are being developed, which try to simulate touch, but they’re still pretty clunky and limited. And forget about smell and taste – we’re nowhere near being able to convincingly simulate those digitally.
The Computing Power
And even if we could figure out the BCI and sensory stuff, the amount of computing power we’d need is mind-boggling. We’re talking about simulating entire worlds, in real-time, with enough detail to fool your brain. That’s a lot of processing.
I started feeling a little discouraged at this point. It seemed like every problem had a dozen more problems hiding underneath it. It was like peeling an onion made of smaller, angrier onions.
So, after all this digging, what’s my conclusion? Honestly, full dive VR, as it’s depicted in fiction, feels incredibly far off. Maybe even impossible with our current understanding of physics and biology. The challenges are just so enormous, and we’re only scratching the surface of some of them.
But I don’t want to do that! Some smart folks are working on this stuff, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll crack some of these problems in ways we can’t even imagine right now. Who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll all be plugging in. But for now, I’m going to stick with my regular VR headset. It’s not full dive, but it’s still pretty darn cool.
