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The well known (and excellent) website ‘Road to VR’ has just published a story about a video made by Federico Heller of production team 3dar that is rather interesting.
It is about the future where VR junkies are addicted to VR and their dependence on it is abused by a third party.
Go ahead and watch it here, spoilers follow below the video.
Spoiler alert.
I rather enjoyed the video, as someone who spend 4 years in film school and a few years making film & TV, I was impressed with how well it was made.
I can enjoy a film simply based on technicalities.
At first I felt a bit defensive, because I consider myself to be VR junkie already, or, like many people, at least a computer & TV addict.
How many people spend almost every available free moment behind a screen?
Yet my house looks pretty decent!
And I still have a social life.
So seeing people obsessed with VR being shown as social outcasts who live in squalor and filth, made me grumble.
But that is of course not quite the subject of the film.
This story is about the state (I assume) abusing those who spend lots of time in VR as entertainment to fight their (very) dirty war.
Connecting their avatar to an actual robot warrior somewhere across the world.
I find this a very realistic scenario and would not be surprised if in the future this is something that actually will happen.
After all nobody wants to risk the lives of their own soldiers and what we do with drones today will one day be possible with robots.
Putting metal boots on the ground.
However, I fear that the state will not have to fool VR junkies into doing this.
Maybe I am too cynical and have too little faith in mankind, but I reckon that they can just recruit gamers.
If a country would offer its civilians the ultimate VR experience, a very exciting combat game that also could be considered as patriotism, doing your bit for freedom and democracy and that could involve a salary or possibly prizes and awards… people would come running.
No need to fool them, no need to mask the reality.
Countless people would enjoy playing this ‘game’ of war even if they knew the people they were shooting were real, as long as they don’t get hurt themselves.
And perhaps most shocking of all, would be that most of these soldiers would be kids.
A battle half way across the world could end abruptly as half the soldiers of one side have to go to bed as it is a ‘school night’.
Anyway, enough dark thoughts.
An interesting video.
And what do you think about the VR device?
A little nose ring…
Make sure you check out more information about it here on the ‘Road to VR’ website.
Jo Yardley's Second Life 