Deep Dive to a Dry Shore
In the
near future I'd suggest
augmented reality will probably have the far bigger impact, it'll be a slow crawl towards a full immersion impressive enough to manipulate the central nervous system and convince the senses enough to satisfy primal needs, and to be able to simulate, in real time, the minutiae of what makes the real world seem so satisfyingly tangible to us, even from a single, limited perspective.
Virtual reality will probably be confined more to highly abstracted and controlled simulation or fantastical expression requiring less detail, for a while yet anyway.
But in the slightly longer term, practical circumstances and established infrastructure will presumably link the augmented with the virtual, and once the economy adapts and even more specialized infrastructure is in place it'll become part of the way we understand and interact with the physical world as much as it is a way to express our myriad of fantasies.
Additionally, some degree of economic rebalancing will probably put a premium on finding solutions to real world problems, since prudent concerns outside of virtual realms will continue to exist.
I can already envision a future where phantasms mingle in the street with those in physical bodies, visible only to they who don their ritual apparel, lasers etching a hallucinatory reality onto their retinas, there may be a need for technology to imprint an implicit understanding of what is and isn't real for those who actually are
present, but that shared hallucination will be more than delusion, these phantasms will interact, maybe not
directly with the laws of physics, beyond what we choose to simulate, but legions of sensors will accumulate authentic data, and disembodied signals will be sent to accommodating receivers, interactions with lights, doors, vehicles, and more may be possible, physical sensations will be convincingly simulated, real goods will be bought and sold, temporary robotic bodies will be rented, even homemade creations thousands of kilometers away could be recreated near perfectly closer to home by atomic-scale additive manufacturing and purchased access to a temporary blueprint, for those not satisfied with entirely virtual approximations.
You can conceptualize entire countries competing for the bounty of traveling ghosts, an international creative economy of previously unimagined scales driving continued accommodation.
Even further into the future, you could see interplanetary colonization with uploaded cognition sent to another world at light speed into pre-established unmanned enterprises, these inhabitants continuing planetary development via their virtual consciousnesses sending ethereal electrical/optical instructions to guide automated processes or alternatively inhabiting cybernetic form perfectly suited to the environment required.
Ultimately, your virtual experience of the real world could be highly flexible to your immediate whims, you could fall out of your front door into the real streets of Bangkok, then take the side alley from there, where it's only a small step to Moscow or Mogadishu, less than 200 seconds to Olympus Mons, and one giant leap to the polychromatic plains of Greater Inferior Prime-ish IV, found neighboring the feeling of disorientation and personal loss, about 1,000 millennia to the south-left of the most cuddly acute angles of virtual spacetime; you'll
know you're there when you're thoroughly confused/aroused.
Phantasmagoria Orgasmagoria
To finally get to the point and answer the actual questions, my psychology would likely express itself through an incomplete ego suicide.
o) What would you be like?
Something formless, flowing along to the distant consultants of horror and asylum, into a manifold of perspectives where the struggles of wisdom and experience are attained and stored in some divorced yet abstractly accessible locale. Its vestigial
limbs may love, may laugh, may be tortured, may despair, but they can always be cut off and pickled for later consumption.
Then that formless something said, "Let us make these gherkins in our intent, in a carefully considered likeness, so that they may learn from the senpai of Japan and the memes in the virtuanet, from the fools and all the madmen, and from all the prodigy that moves deep along the ether."
o) What world would you live in?
In the real world I already regularly conceptualize fictional worlds, it has been a hobby of mine since I was very young to define elements of these sorts of microcosms, usually in the unrealized form of a
game, a format where you play with the laws of interaction and try to predict the outcomes.
But I'm not sure if any of them follow a singular form either, they're usually firmly conceptually defined only to a certain extent, after that each pebble I infrequently kick sends ripples that adjusts the entire remaining shape without necessarily invalidating the preceding; they're malleable, within limits. A network of paths that all lead back to the same abode.
If they were to virtually exist they wouldn't be for other people to pollute and impress, they'd be oases for myself only, highly crafted, unfolding origami experiences that could be navigated in countless ways, without the need to semantically or pragmatically atrophy it so that others can understand. A world of both intent and impulse.
Equally interesting to me would be voyaging through the galaxies that other minds had made, an open-source universe where you could experience the greatest artistry from betwixt billions of creators would inevitably be as fascinating as anything I could design; those experiences would surely influence my own fictions as well.
Addendum
Something I didn't address anywhere above but that is fascinating to explore in this context would be manipulation of our perception of time, I had a lot of ideas but it was difficult to embed anywhere organically without rewriting everything again, so I'll just
leave a link here and let other people's minds do the wondering|wandering.
For any left puzzled, the section titles are ludicrous organizational gibberish and little else.
), observing and recording the findings. These are probably the first few things (in a ridiculously long and unfathomably intricate list) I'd think of doing.
