by Susan, HSM team writer

Like a deserted painting upon an empty wall one memory fills my head.  Apparently they are here once again.  Infinite memories that mess with my inner peace. Confusing thoughts in a bittersweet way. Creating a mental painting-fragile and different-that stands out in a gallery of fine art because that’s who I am.  I’m weird, I’m different, nothing more and nothing less than the victim of a virtual reality.

–Yaki

The second series was shown to the gaming community at the recent  2014 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.  This new version is about to be released to the public, and it is currently available for pre-order for $350.  Another VR headset that was available for demonstration was Sony’s introduction into the HMD market – a device that is currently called Project Morpheus.  The headset has been designed for the PS4, with indications that it might do a few more things a little bit better than the Rift and will have the ability to utilize the technology of other Sony components such as the camera, the Move and the Dualshock controller.

There was a television series on the Sci-Fy channel called Battlestar Galactica, and what I would like to reference is the backstory series — Caprica — which explored the possibility of combining artificial intelligence with robotics to create cybernetic soldiers and workers. Cylons. Eventually they evolved into two different races, one being what we called “the toasters” and the other was based on bioengineering and synthetic biology. All of this happened because the daughter of the designer of the Cylons was escaping the real world by immersing herself into an avatar based virtual world: V World.

Entry into V-World required two things: a body scan and a headset. Your avatar was a personification – a digitial construct – of you in every detail, and you could do anything you wanted to do. The one rule was: when you die, you don’t get to come back. The world you were immersed in was called New Cap City, and was a replication of Caprica, but with a darker side/ambiance to it ( because it was an underground world).  It had its own club, called V-Club, with (of course) a VIP room. V-World access was gained through us use of a set headset that looks like the Google glasses of today and logging into what they called a holoband anywhere you wanted to — not just in your home. Each planet had it’s own V-World, and users could go to a holo-cafe to utilize unlimited bandwidth and planetary interaction. The decline of V-World eventually was attributed to it’s pornographic and  hacked illegal sites.

What if we could access Home through these?

Why am I telling you all this?  In the few seconds after hearing about the Facebook purchase of Oculus VR I immediately thought of them taking Facebook and allowing users the ability to create an avatar, which got me thinking of Caprica, and then had me then thinking of PlayStation Home. On several occasions I have compared V-World to Home because I find so many similarities between the two. They have a holoband and we have PSN. V-world allows access to a wide variety off landscapes, activities and games — all digitally created constructs.V-World had flight simulator and we used to have Red Bull Air racing. They had a social dating site called V-Match and we have the core spaces. There was a Virtual Heaven and a religious army called The Soldiers of the One – that was a fam name I suggested with back in 2010, and SOTE was our sign. Users of the holo band could also create personal spaces.  Another similarity for me is Home seems to be on a decline, and I hear a lot of people say they left because of hackers and trolls.

I’m sitting on the hotel balcony pondering the what if’s of all this.  What if a new version of PlayStation Home was available for the PS4? What if we could use the Sony HMD to not only play games but use it while in Home? Then I thought what if we could use “Morpheus” device in conjunction with the upcoming PlayStation Now concept, and what if Project Morpheus was able to be reduced to the size of the Google glasses. What if the glasses has wireless technology? I could be sitting on the balcony in some hotel room overlooking the ocean while I am logged into PlayStation Home all the while wearing a sunglasses looking device and using some type of game controller? Yeah, right. As for any critics who complain about the possibility of  any data mining going or advertisements being placed, I would respond and say it has always been a part of our world. If, after all these decades you’re still upset over it, then I would suggest a game of non-digital chess.  I am all about the influx of “wearables” hitting the market now and am excited to see what’s next.

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One Response to “Virtual Reality and Home”

1. KrazyFace says:

   April 7, 2014 at 9:37 am

   I had similar thoughts when I read about FB buying Oculus too. Maybe we live in a dream world (eh, Neo? lol) but it’s the dream world where ideas for the real world are born. I’m not impressed with Luckey selling out to FB either but the guy’s in his 20’s, and was offered mucho-monies so I can’t really blame him. Anyways, as for Home and VR I think it’s a very real possibility and while Sony already have a serious foot-hold on a dynamic socializing program (and FB is still just pages on a screen) I think they’d be a bit mad NOT to look into this with Project Morpheus. The virtual world is already there, we just need those un-sung underdogs that code things to do their magic with it.

   The next 10 years will be very exciting I think.

   Good read, thanks.

   Reply