Re: Gattaca on TV this weekend

From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 00:13:34 MDT


On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:

> That only tests the ideas in VR. Testing in reality takes longer.

VR is just some fancy realtime graphics and audio rendered for helmeted
monkeys. There's no or only minimal physics involved. You can always tell
it's VR, and be it because you can always walk through seemingly solid
scenery.

Artificial reality is simulated monkeys in a rendered world, which is
indistinguishable from reality. Only that much physics is involved to not
make the world look like fake.

Prototyping in machina using purely numerical models shouldn't be called
VR, since it can be confused with the above. The point of in machina
prototyping is eliminating the bulk of work with atoms, ideally removing
the need for it completely.

> It is easy to restart VR if it crashes. Reality is harder to recover.

There's software crashes and simulated airplane crashes. Which do you
mean?

> No matter how fast the VR goes, reality will always lag behind. VR
> will keep getting faster and faster, while reality continues to lag
> farther and farther behind. This is why I predict that realtime

This is the reason why the bulk of activities in future will not happen in
reality (but of course you only ignore the hardware layer at your peril).

> testing and implementation will increasingly become the bottleneck of
> future technology.

Mature cultures don't develop technologies once they hit plateau of what
is physically possible. It is also inaccurate to call it technology (even
if it started this way), since you don't call your body technology.



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