That's a very good question, especially in sociology. VR is still not accessible to everyone for now, i guess we'll have to wait and see what happens in the future ;/
Then again, this whole question is worth thinking about... (in my opinion)

Full immersion would be so difficult, maybe it'll be done, but easily available, I'm not sure about that. You'd have to be paralysed, then have some kind of neural scanner which takes your intended movements and translate them into the virtual world, then, take all the output from the virtual world, like touch, scent, hot, cold, gravity etc, and somehow link that up to your senses/brain.

I can't see how it'd be done without surgery of some kind, which will put a lot of people off, and if its brain surgery then it'll be expensive. But then, maybe there will be some kind of machine your put over your head and it just... does everything without needing surgery. No idea how that would work :D Maybe AI can figure it out.

I think what we will probably see is some kind of augmented reality becoming popular, like in theme parks and so on, its already happening to a certain extent. So even with a full VR headset, you could still argue its augmented reality, if you wear it on a rollercoaster, and it makes you think you're flying through space in a fighter or something.

Agreed, you're much better off just taking a premeditated dosage of natural shrooms mesculin etc.

The movie blade runner was made in 1982 and set in a future 2019 where everybody had flying cars and there were cyborgs so real they could not be distinguished from a real human.

I like to bring up how far off the predictions of that 1982 movie were from what we have really achieved by 2019 whenever anybody tries to make predictions for the next 30 or so years.

There are some ideas from sci fi I don’t believe will ever happen.

Hehehe when movie Matrix was made people laughed at it. Now many of them pays a lot of money to investigate if our reality inst simulated and they might have some arguments worth thinking on.
That's what is great about movies and games you can talk about some topic and approach them differently but noone will call you an idiot or retard due to it being highly improbable(and often even pays to see game or movie ! :D)

Books are hella cool. Basically virtual reality.

We are decades away. Fully immersive can only be achieved with surgical direct neural interface. It's not that we aren't close. We aren't even close to start even guessing how something like that could even be achieved. We know nothing of the brain still.

And a direct neural interface is probably not even physically possible.

But yeah, if it would be achievable it would mean the end for a lot of nerds.

The rest of the humanity would learn quicly to stay well away from that shit. After all, heroine and co are already better drugs than that. Most people know better than to mess with it.

As close as we were in the 90's.

Elon Musk thinks we are already in a simulation with full immersion. I did not really get the point as to why he thinks this is most propable, but anyways. If you follow that thought, developing full immersion would mean nesting of two or more full immersions. Could that mean, if we reach full immersion we would just hop to our former immersion layer but exchange the programming of our world? Or could another immersion layer added be in fact more immersive then the former?

There was a paper where (some) physicists arrived to a conclusion that our universe cannot be a simulation:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758

Interestingly despite my english at above basic level I have a really hard time understanding new complex information that is not in my native language. I guess I'm not the language learning type. In the case of this link, I cannot even say if that article is serious or maybe a hoax. It certainly starts sounding like a hoax when I cannot relate to almost anything that is said, despite having some knowledge of physics and maths.

This is either way above my understanding or you are pranking me :)
Care to explain in laymans terms how the paper proved that we could not be inside a simulation?

Sorry for the late replay, not much free time nowadays.

First of all, I'm certainly not qualified to explain physics or math problems in layman’s terms. I do read a lot about all kind of science subject (pretty much every day), but that is just a hobby of mine.

As I understand correctly, the two scientist were trying to simulate some quantum phenomenon (in metals) with the Monte Carlo method (approximation by random sampling), and they proved that a particular quantum phenomenon is impossible (by principle) to simulate, because the complexity of the simulation and the data need to be stored along with it would increase exponentially with the introduction of each new particle.

However, one could argue that the device simulating the universe should not be bound by the law of physics of said simulated universe, so there is that.

That idea of being in a simulation is some peoples way of trying to explain our existance or the existance of the universe. Many people have written stuff about that idea, not that I have read it.

I think there was a book written where they liken the universe to a simulation and use a videogame analogy to explain much of what is going on.

I dont think this helps explain things because if this reality is not real it still has to exist within another reality that needs to be explained, and then you are back at step 1 again.

Somewhat unrelated there are a couple of videogames about this concept but really its just the back story and not so much the actual gameplay that uses this idea.

There is SOMA which has a story about transfering our intelligence into an AI simulation and blasting it into space as the end of the world is occuring

And there is Talos principal which is a completely different game but is also linked back to SOMA. Talos Principal takes place inside that simulation.

The reasoning was something along these lines:

If its possible for a species to advance to the point where it can create simulations, it stands to reason they would create multiple simulations, and that there would be multiple species doing it. So, given there is one reality, and many simulations, the odds are we're in a simulation, just because there are a lot more simulations than reality.

It does kind of make sense. Lets say for example there is no way to travel vast distances like in star trek. You might still be curious how life could evolve on a planet you see far away. So, rather than actually visit that planet, you just punch in the data collected from it, and simulate it. Maybe simulate it thousands or millions of times and see what results you get. Seeing as it would be a complete simulation, the people that evolved on there would be conscious, there would be no difference between them evolving in a simulation or in reality. So we could be in a simulation like that.

Or maybe, some advanced species gets bored, and they just live out random lives in computer simulations, so that would mean when you die, you'll discover you're an alien :D

Reality is information dense, with all that subatomic and quantum level state. How are we going to store (let alone gather) all that information for an entire planet in less physical space than the planet itself occupies?

Nature "simulates" itself just by existing. The computers required to simulate it are more complex than the thing being simulated. For example, an atom is tiny, but just by existing it "simulates" all the laws that govern it while the computer needed to do that same simulation is trillions of times the size.

I have my doubts that it will ever be possible to condense the atom simulator into less space than that of the atom itself.

So the simulator simulates a reality at a lower level of detail, which is often good enough and might be good for fun and games, but not for simulating the evolution of species on an alien planet over billions of years and somehow doing it less time.

Never mind if the planet being simulated itself contained simulators. Then we'd have to simulate their simulators in our simulator. :D

Basically anything possible in the physical space of our simulator would be possible in the physical space of the planet, so our simulator would have to be at least as big. :D

The thing is, you can come up with arguments against it, and I agree that they seem to be valid, but the whole point is we wouldn't know how to do it yet. In the end there are a lot of interesting avenues to ponder about it.

For example you could argue that much of the information in a planet, has no (or minimal) effect on anything. Like, you don't need to simulate every atom, you set it up so it's a lot more efficient, but it "appears" to be working in the same way, and it effectively does work in the same way. If whoever sets up the simulation has a complete knowledge about how everything works, it might be possible. Its like evolution, it doesn't necessarily do the most efficient thing to get the same result, it just does it in whatever way it happened to do it. If you knew how it all worked, you might find you can cut out 95% of its complications and make it much easier to simulate.

Then there is the game-like simulation, where we'd be the players in a game, and that would be much easier, because you'd only have to process the information that the players receive, and you can restrict them in ways that they aren't aware of.

For simulations within simulations, I guess maybe that's when they pull the plug :D Or maybe, their universe is different to ours, and they always simulate universes which are much more restricted than their own. So then, any universe they simulate, would find it impossible to simulate their own universe, so you wouldn't end up with multiple simulations inside each other, because it'd kind of taper off as the simulations became more and more restricted.

Good luck with proving that the simulation has not diverged from the reality as a result of the information being discarded, especially when you have things like the butterfly effect. :D

I don't see any strong reason to believe that is happening.

But yes, I agree they could simulate simpler universes, but our universe doesn't seem to be lacking in complexity (it seems to be more complex than it needs to be just for a simulation). One could always argue that a simulation of such complexity is a fully fledged reality anyway.

Each time another level of simulation is added, the simulation would have to become simpler than its containing simulation until eventually the simulation was at the minimum level of simplicity to support a "reality" and the intelligent life needed to build a simulator in it. Since they're at the bottom of the tree, you'd expect a large portion of the simulations to be of that simple type. You'd think our universe could do with a lot more simplification.

Of course, anything is possible, but that's no reason to believe anything. In the absence of evidence, maybe it better to believe what is beneficial for us to believe, and I doubt believing we're in some fake simulation run by alien overlords is that. :D

And even those alien overlords in the real reality could come up such a theory and be unable to disprove it. You could always suppose the existence of a more complex container reality, and maybe there is one, but that doesn't necessarily make our universe a simulation in it.

I think the main reasoning behind believing we are already in a simulation is this:

It's assumed that from the moment it's possible for X to run a simulation, there will not just be one simulation run and that's it, but instead there will be many many many simulations being run by X from that point onwards (either simultaneously or one after the other, doesn't really matter).

What are the chances that we are in the #1 levi's original real mccoy, and not one of the thousands, millions, billions, or infinite simulations?

In other words it's not a 50:50 chance, it's supossedly a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000...:1 chance.

Seems plausible hypothesis reasoning to me, but I'm also a high school dropout with a weak spot for sci-fi. Then again, this ratio is assuming there's one universe, or a handful. If there's more universes than simulations it tips back in favour of us being the real deal. Ultimately impossible to know.

The one thing that does kinda seem funny to me is, the deeper we explore down through the microscope into quantum particles and beyond... we just end up finding what appear to be... pixels? bits? ones and zeros? :x

Let's just hope we're the product of the ultraverse's John Carmack and not some shit made by the Saber equivalent.

It seems to me there's a lot of assumptions in that ratio of yours. :D

I think you're right, and the only thing it is possible to say with confidence is that it is impossible to know, or even to have any meaningful way of assessing the probability---after all, you're talking about container universes in which absolutely nothing is known and not even our logic can be assumed to apply.

I said it already, but I think in the absence of evidence we should err on the side of believing something a little more life affirming than "we're living in a fake world created by aliens". It's a bit like believing in solipsism, also impossible to disprove and potentially leading to something like psychopathic behaviour. After all, no one is "real", and I'm not real myself, so it doesn't matter how I treat people---only self-interest matters. Of all the unprovable things we could choose to believe, I don't think this one particularly benefits mankind.

If I understand correctly the big bang would be the start of the simulation, the simulation could or could not stem from the real world, time would be relative, could be strongly compressed.

I have some huge issues with how an individual would fit into this simulation and how this relates to the full immersion.... Once you enter full immersion in the real world, you are reborn? Or, your memories are fabricated until a certain point where you enter full immersion?

However you enter full immersion, why would your individual life be so horribly flawed? Compare to computer games, there is no reality applied where you feel sad, suicidal, are weak or terminally ill. This strongly goes against the notion of living in a full immersion if you ask me.
It can be explained by a simulated universe, in which you as an individual have no special significance. But that woulnd't make any real difference in my mind. I don't really care how exactly my experience on this earth started, the only relevant point is if it will end once I die...in full immersion no, of course not. In a simulation, probably yes.

Consider this: everyone who's life isn't perfect is just born into the simulation of one specific individual. The whole universe is build around this one individual, who is in a full immersion. What a sad universe for everyone else :p

"What a sad universe for everyone else :p"

Except if it like this:p http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

I think near perfect photorealistic augmented reality is close (couple of decades). You will be able to have a very old and ugly "creature" riding on you while being replaced with the most beautiful women in your vision (or mind/whatever).

Full immersion - on the other hand - is still long way to go. Not because of the required processing power, interface or hardware (everything will be cloud based anyways), but because our perception of artificial reality will also become more and more refined and sensitive to the tiny flaws and used techniques what we simply can't really "detect" now (or only a very few of us do perhaps), the same way how sombody from a hundred years ago would find today's film effects "real" compared to how we can tell them apart from reality (most of the times).

full VR will be out on 8th march :>

closest thing to full VR are LSD and mushrooms. It will show you the best textures you've ever seen!
Conscious dreaming is in some aspects closer to full VR but the textures arent this sharp... at least I cant see hd textures in those dreams.... everything was so 1024x768 but feelings eg warm/cold things is very close to reality.

I had a lot of fun with lucid dreaming a few years ago. It was all perfectly HD, looked and felt just like reality. It happened so much it started to get annoying because I'd wake up after and have to get back to sleep. But I got to experiment a lot, like walking through walls and glass windows without breaking them, teleporting, flying. I once had one where I was sarge from Q3, and aliens were attacking mars, there were these drop pods that were spewing out cyborgs, I was tearing through them with the full Q3 loadout, then I done a rocket jump up into the sky, grabbed a UFO and ripped it apart with my bare hands, and all the aliens fell out screaming to the ground. That was probably the best one I had :D

Obviously you are too much into quake... Althought I like to use rl & rg in my lucid dreams too xD

Ye also had quake dream while experimenting whith lucid dreaming. But i was playing sort of tdm on map similar to cpm21 combined with somehospital i mean part of map was likle cpm21 battlesuit spawn and in next room textures looked like some sick hospital from horror games. I remeber taking bs twice : DDDDDD

I believe it will be within 30 years.

What happened with all the Oculus and the rest of the gadgets buzz from two years ago? Nobody talking about VR anymore.

If I had to guess, people got over it because

(1) It's uncomfortable and not that small and light of a thing to have strapped to your head while looking at a screen is much more comfortable.
(2) Lots of people get motion sickness and can't use it for very long. Not sure that can be fixed since it comes from your eyes detecting motion while your ears do not.
(3) Not being able to easily see or hear your surroundings is disconcerting.
(4) Wires are annoying.
(5) It's not cheap.
(6) It's not really "virtual reality". It's basically only a special type of monitor strapped to your head. You move around and interact with the world using a conventional interface. You can't actually walk around without bumping into things.
(7) This type of VR is decades old and seems to be pretty much the same as back then just with improvements in graphics and price; the hype has come and gone in the past.
(8) That level of immersion isn't needed for a good game, and some people have said it is just too immersive anyway. Maybe it's good if you really want to be scared shitless in a horror game. :D
(9) Graphical fidelity is far from the most important aspect of a game.

As I said, just my guess, and I'm sure it will find some good applications outside of games.

thanks