HACKER Q&A
📣 cardosof

How close to Ready Player One's Oasis are we in 2021?


I've seen people playing Skyrim on VR while walking on a treadmill, which made me curious: if someone had infinite money and access to cutting edge technology (Facebook wrist, etc) to set up the best possible fully immersive virtual reality experience, would it be anywhere near the Oasis experience?

I'm clueless about this space so apologies if it's a stupid question.


  👤 h2odragon Accepted Answer ✓
AFAIK the "force feedback" aspect is almost totally lacking. We've got no way to make it feel like you've touched something yet.

If you've done a driving game with a force feedback wheel vs without, its amazing how much the haptic feedback adds. Now spread that out to all those sensations that make up any activity; "VR" hasn't done much more than nod to the desirability of more complete feedback.

IIRC Neal Stephenson had some hard lessons when he tried to develop a VR fencing game; you can't do much to simulate hitting things without actually hitting things. see https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang


👤 jasonkester
For me, the interesting thing about Ready Player One isn't the VR or treadmills. It's the ability to seamlessly transition between games that seems like the killer app that will come from that.

The vast majority of video games these days are of the genre where you're moving a humanoid character around in a 3d environment. I'd love to see somebody come out with a bridge that allowed you to hop between various types of those games.

You should be able to seamlessly go from playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater to Grand Theft Auto to Skyrim on the fly. The only real differences in those games are the scenery and what details they chose to spend effort refining. One day somebody will figure out how to extract the commonality and convince enough studios to get on board building on top of it as a platform, and you'll get a pretty good first cut of the Oasis.


👤 paulz_
Quite Close!

As you implied it would be expensive to experience the cutting edge right now but here is what it would look like:

You would want a really high end headset, a haptic suit, haptic gloves, graphics cards and a pc to run it, and game to actually experience it.

-Pimax 8k $1500

-Research grade haptic gloves[0] $5000-$10000?

-Tesla Suit $2750

-Gaming pc and Scalped 3090s to run in SLI $10000

You could do a treadmill too but I actually don't think that tech is quite there yet and question just how much more immersed you would be at that point.

Now once your discount iron man suit is fully equipped what game do you actually play? You mentioned skyrimVR it actually has ok haptic support via mods.

However, what you really would want to play for the full Oasis experience is VRChat where with your haptic suit you could high five someone or feel them tap on your shoulder. It's also a thriving community full of bizarre worlds and avatars. Most of the hardware isn't directly supported in VRChat but you can find guides online of people getting it to work.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK2y4Z5IkZ0


👤 rir494
I never thought touchscreens would ever be feasible on all phones sold (It was just too expensive 12-15 years ago). Nor did I think Facebook or Youtube would ever solve their scaling problems (communication was all one to one or one to many back then, few people could afford to broadcast). But here we are.

Metcalfe's Law (and Reed's Law) state every time some new development gets added to the networked world the value addition may scale geometrically or even exponentially because of how many people get exposed to it thanks to the network...when that kind of growth happens all kinds of unimaginable things are possible.


👤 sachin9
We can simulate few experiences with the sources we have, but it won't be entirely possible to replicate it just like the movie.

At this point of time, The money, infrastructure and amount of work required is damn high when compared to the returns we get from the post work. The whole VR/AR/XR/MR are at pivotal stage and not that efficient. According to my knowledge you can expect something like that by end of the decade.


👤 BizarroLand
What is lacking is a neural link, since using gloves and external gadgets to try to trick the brain into thinking its experiences are real will always fail an immersion test on some level.

A neural link would directly stimulate the brain to directly experience the sensations of the virtual world without directly feeling the impacts of attacks or fall damage, and aside from uncanny valley issues that is the last great frontier of computer gaming. It is also the difference between what we have and what Ready Player One had.

If all of human science and effort were bent on creating neural link technology like that I would guess it would take us at least 20 years to pull that off, so if that ever happens I'm sure it will be long after we are all dead and gone.


👤 jcbsd
I'd say a long way off. The commercial guys doing augmented reality are focusing on snapchat and instagram filters, not on fully immersive VR experiences. (for example https://atomicdigital.design)

Not to say the Oasis-type design isn't possible, just that we're aren't there yet, but as @rir494 said, it's hard to predict until you know what kind of resources and growth are really possible.


👤 thorin
When I read this in like 2017, I thought the idea of home schooling in bulk online was ridiculous, not many places are still doing it! Unbelievable, I'm certainly pleased the majority of schools in the UK are fully school based, but I hear this is not the case in California and much of East Asia (not china).

👤 Raed667
I don't think we will go that path, I think that VR will fade away when we have usable/portable AR.