Virtual Reality: Definitely Maybe

I've noticed that in recent years, authors have become more willing to portray the near future.  It used to be that science-fiction authors would prefer to focus on the more distant future because it was more interesting and there was less chance of being proven wrong.  And non-science-fiction writers would avoid the near future because ewwwww, genre fiction! 

But now they're more open to it. Mainstream writers aren't afraid of sci-fi any more, and the Science-Fiction genre itself has become more open-minded.
All this has lead to a greater chance of seeing predictions from books coming true in your lifetime.  For instance, a few weeks ago I made a reference to the "sponsored years" concept from Infinite Jest.  That hasn't happened (yet) but the novel also mentions a business that streams TV and movies, and delivers recordings by mail.  That's pretty much Netflix.

Recently, I've been reading Ready Player One, an unapologetic celebration of geek-culture of the 1980's.  The story centres around a virtual-reality world called OASIS.  That's hardly unique in the sci-fi world; global online virtual reality worlds are today's green bug-eyed alien with a ray gun.  But this is a book released last year that expects us to believe such a thing could start up right now.

That got me thinking: could it happen?  After all, Virtual Reality is, to the information age, what electric cars were to the industrial age: something that seems to be permanently just around the corner.  But now it seems the rise of electric cars is just a matter of waiting for the slow march of battery technology and gas prices.  So maybe there's hope for VR too.

The book indicates that the system required three breakthroughs: 

1. Big computers behind the scenes to handle millions of people interacting with one another (in today's online games, like World of Warcraft, you don't get to meet all the millions of people playing, just the few thousand that are connected to the same server as you.)  Well that innovation just seems like a matter of time as computer technology progresses.
2. Cheap, lightweight virtual reality glasses.  And oh look, someone is already doing that.
3. Haptic feedback gloves.  (Haptic means touch, see; it's a glove that makes it feel like you're touching virtual objects.)  I'm assuming they mean something more sophisticated than the old Nintendo Power Glove.

So there you go: most of it is doable, but it all comes down to the gloves.  Hopefully not everyone in technology is working on apps or social networks (or batteries.)