I have the seed of a story idea from a post in my linked-in account.
Virtuix Omni has a omnidirectional treadmill simulator for virtual reality games and other applications. They posted a video of a guy playing a game by using his whole body.
Right now the stereotype for gamers, at least in my head, is that they are smart, couch potatoes. (I’m not getting into if that is accurate or not)
What if this new technology changed that stereotype? What if gamers became elite athletes?
Farther down in the comments they mentioned a neural interface company. That company is working on integrating so that the VR is driven fully by the brain. So now we have people who could just use their minds to play the games.
It’s just a seed at this point.
What if there was a world with both and they were in conflict or competing for some reason?
What would be their pluses and minuses for the way they access the game? Would one have to be constantly on the move because of how much there physical body needed? Did they have to eat special things? Was a risk of the other atrophied bodies? Did they have lairs with guards?
What would happen if two of them had to switch modes?
I saw the beginnings of this a long time ago (like 2005 I think) at Game Developers Conference, and again at Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (a display where wearing headsets you would concentrate and cause a fan to spin, which pushed an object toward another player).
I can see this becoming a thing – to your last post about your kids not believing about things you used to do, some day they will bore their grandkids with stories about how you used to have to push letters on a set of buttons or shout into a microphone or move a pointer around to communicate with our devices. We might even see that day ourselves.
And technology changing cultural norms isn’t just a what-if; it’s sociology. Heavy people used to be a sign of wealth. Lobsters were cheap prisoner food.
If you can directly manipulate the physical world with your mind it would be another device for human consciousness – like the wheel or the plow or the automobile. Thoughts, the stream of coordinated electrical activity generated by a conscious brain (or even an unconsicous one), would become a precious resource like electricity or paper or oil.
“Think” would become even more of an active verb and since most human brains emit about the same amount of actual electricity, the power would be not in brute strength but quickness and multi-threaded processing – walk, and chew gum, and spin plates at the same time.
And with networking what if you could transfer that thought over distance? Think of the opportunities to help lift rocks in Africa. Think of the slave farms – we build our own Matrix before the machines get around to it.
And if you could transfer -from- of course next step is transfer to? What happens to individuality when the human body becomes nothing more than a container for consciousness? If you are a techie think about a Docker for thoughts and consciousness.
There are lots of extant works around this of course (Moon 49, Ready Player One, Brainstorm, Dreamscape, The Matrix of course) but those are all more about inner life and sessile humans living in dream worlds.
What happens when the dreams manifest themselves in reality?
Very thought provoking. I had no idea about lobster.
About that – https://www.history.com/news/a-taste-of-lobster-history#:~:text=%E2%80%A2%20Dirt-cheap%20because%20they%20were%20so%20copious%2C%20lobsters,only%20be%20served%20the%20shellfish%20twice%20a%20week.
I think I need a keyboard and some more time to gather my thoughts. I had also read a paper that said that consciousness could be an electromagnetic field.
Or a quantum computer, which doesn’t create things so much as hold multiple levels in a qubit at the same time and only expresses a values drive by its neighbors. Kind of.
So if you had links to consciousness, a consciousness linked to other consciousnesses might produce -different- thoughts than it would on its own…it would be like gardening, trying to grow different kinds of flowers and vegetables in a garden, making your peas healthier by planting them next to tomatoes (or however that really works).
Or…what if a device sort of like a 3-D printer, designed to render things from molecular-size particles, could be attached to a consciousness? What could come out?
Not Moon 44 – Carver’s Gate (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112639/)
Oh that does look interesting. Thanks for the link.
There are some good user reviews on that one.