Ask A Genius 916: Fallout
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/19
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I have various bins for things I want to write about that still need to be fully developed. This is the bin of one of the bins of stuff I may or may not expand into as I write this thing. I’ve got a thing called choosies, which are explorable movies. Do you remember Choose Your Adventure books? Probably not. I think you might be too young for those, and maybe they didn’t hit Canada, but they were books for young readers where you were presented with decision points in the book, and if you want your character to pick up the sword, then turn to page 26, if you want your character to leave the sword and enter the cave you know go to page 35. So, they were branching books where you’d experience a story where you made maybe a dozen choices; I only read a part of these books. So, there were various paths through the books. In the future, we will have explorable worlds, like a merger of explorable video games plus movies plus Choose Your Adventure.
I’m calling them choosies, which is a terrible name, but so is the name movies for films where people can immerse themselves; if you like a movie and the world it presents, you’ll be able to enter the VR of that movie. The first will be for established franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek. You can live in a Star Wars universe, but there’ll be a zillion of these in the future. Some of them will be pegged to points in time like somebody will build a virtual 1940s world where you can be various people in World War II or choose the war to have different outcomes. I just watched Fallout, the TV series adapted from the video game Fallout, which is built from the idea that the US was devastated by nuclear war at some point in the 1950s, and it’s now 200 years later.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is based on a popular video game.
Rosner: Yeah, called Fallout, and I think there have been four releases at least that further develop the game, and it’s well-loved, and the design aesthetic is that design pretty much froze in the 1950s; it’s 200 years later, but given that civilization was almost wiped out or was frozen in people living in vaults underground, that everything looks like the 1950s even though it’s like the year 2200. So, they built a whole world, and the closing credits on every episode, they pull out from the ending scene so you see the world around the scene. A lot of the show takes place in the ruins of Los Angeles, so one ending credit pull-out pulls out from the space-aged restaurant at LAX, which looks like a landing spaceship. That’s been out of business for ten years but has yet to be torn down. It sits there vacant, but you pull out to see the surrounding LA.
So obviously, the Fallout people in building both the video games and the TV series have built an entire fairly extensive virtual world, and in the future, you’ll be able to pay an extra fee probably; maybe they’ll give you a limited license to explore the world just for the price of the movie or the video game, but in the future, you can probably pay extra if you want to have a week of exploring the entire world. If it’s a famous enough globe, there might be enough stuff to spend hours in it every day and choose your adventures. It’s just a merging of movies, TV, and video games into something you experience like life. I mean, that’s coming.
Jacobsen: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think the details are going to be lifelike, but I believe that the amount of detail in the future is going be so significant that it’ll be past the point at which our brains can distinguish, like seeing a high-resolution television from far away enough that you can’t tell the difference between reality and it; something similar to that.
Rosner: We talked about the uncanny valley where computer-generated humans looked creepy when they started getting closer to reality. The primary example that comes to mind is The Polar Express, starring Tom Hanks, which was released 20 years ago, and we’re already way beyond that. We were in the uncanny valley because that movie creeped some people out, but now the images are close enough to reality. In many cases, they’re indistinguishable, but that’s just for visual, for your ears. There’s no problem with simulating anybody’s authentic voice to the point where people don’t get creeped out by robot voices and don’t need to be robotic. A major hurdle will be flesh sensations, which are more challenging because you’ll need entire suits for full-body immersion. Will people give a crap about that?
The central part that people care about sensation will be sexual, and there’s already a name for it. We’ve talked about Teledildonics, a dumb name; maybe they will come up with a less stupid name as it becomes more mainstream. It’s obviously at a ridiculously primitive level that’s been around for probably ten years, and people make fun of that. I’ve never seen a real one, but people probably use it called the Flesh Light, which is a thing that looks like a flashlight, but once you unscrew the lid, it’s it looks like a vagina, and I guess you just put it on yourself. I don’t know if it vibrates, but anyway, there’s all this stuff; there are these things made of flexible plastic silicon that you can have sex with, including full, very realistic-looking women. So, I’m sure that sex in virtual reality will be a hurdle to living in virtual reality. That market forces will eventually force the development of gratifying and increasingly realistic virtuals about sex.
So, I guess that includes genital stuff and kissing, I think and stroking, just hands-on skin, and that’s going to be challenging, but people will probably pay for it at some point. At some point, it’ll probably be suits that promise to be gratifying and realistic but probably won’t be, and then maybe technology will figure it out at some point. Still, I don’t know if, in the near medium future, technology could figure out a way to wrap around your spinal column at some point and send a simulated sensation that way. I guess someday, I don’t know, but for a bunch of people, just the sight and sounds would be sufficient.
Carole spends up to eight hours a day sitting and writing this book. She was writing, and her shoulders were getting crampy and bunched up. We needed a more adjustable chair, so we went to Staples and looked at office chairs. The salesperson said to avoid getting an office chair. An office chair is suitable for eight hours. Get a gaming chair that you can sit in comfortably for 12 hours. People are already adjusting to spending half their waking hours or more in virtual environments playing whatever this year’s Call of Duty is. I haven’t Googled it, but I wonder why people if they’re going to be spending, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours a day in a virtual environment, are even sitting up in a chair. I’m going to Google Reclining Rig. I’m looking at these rigs, and they look like dentist chairs. So, they elevate your legs slightly so blood isn’t pooling in your legs. My dad was a workaholic, and he fell asleep in his chair; it’s like you see homeless people who can never sit down to sleep; they’re always sleeping on benches and stuff, and your lower legs turn swollen and purple. So, at least some of these rigs lift your legs so you don’t get that problem.
Here’s a cheap one for $3,300 bucks, with a panoramic. There needs to be a desk in front of you. Instead, there’s an arm that comes up from behind you and hangs a set of three video screens arranged side by side horizontally in front of you so that you can play across a panorama, which is really how you see the world, that most of what we look at when we’re outside is a very horizontal horizon. When we’re driving, we are concerned about a visual field that’s ten times as wide as it is tall. So, these video game rigs attempt to simulate that with side-by-side screens to give you an uninterrupted horizon. There’s an article about a recliner, but is anybody selling it yet? The best you get is like a lazy boy where you lean back, and your legs come up, but that’s sufficient.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 