In Ernest Cline’s book, Ready Player One, it’s 2045 and “missing millions” have retreated into a virtual world called OASIS to escape from a reality consumed by climate change, economic depression and an energy crisis. And you thought Brexit was bad. But, in real life, how far away are we from spending large chunks of our day in a virtual world?
The premise of the book – which is now also a film directed by Steven Spielberg – might sound far-fetched, but consider life right now. The first person you conversed with this morning was probably on WhatsApp or FaceTime. You checked the weather on an app instead of looking out the window. At work, you talked to a colleague on Gchat, MSN Messenger or Slack rather than walking over to their desk. We socialise on Facebook, update Instagram Stories instead of sending postcards, and get our news delivered to our inbox instead of our postbox.
And Ready Player One’s imagined set-up is seeping into our everyday existence in other ways too – we can already create our own personal avatars thanks to Bitmoji, and the new iPhone X even has the ability to turn you into an animoji. The stream of augmented reality (AR) filters we play with on Snapchat and Instagram would’ve been unthinkable even just a few years ago, and the phenomenon that is Pokemon Go! is just the first of many AR games waiting to become our new obsession.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that Ready Player One’s protagonist, Wade Watts, lives in the Stacks (a trailer park with vehicle upon vehicle piled on top of each other), and uses a console, visor, and haptic gloves, suits and boots to navigate the expansive world of the OASIS, where his avatar, Parzival, goes to school and hangs out with friends in virtual basements. But e-learning, virtual chatrooms and the technology to access VR from our homes is already here. According to a survey by YouGov, 6% of the British population now own VR headgear. That might not sound like a lot, but at the equivalent time after widespread release, wearables were at 4% and tablets at 3%.
Several prototypes of haptic gloves and body suits are in development – a little like the ones that allow Wade to “feel” the touch of his love interest Art3mis when they go to a virtual club. Current real world model HaptX uses small inflated air bubbles to displace your skin, simulating the forces of a virtual environment. “You can touch virtual objects and feel their shape, size, texture, temperature and force as if they existed in the real world,” says HaptX chief executive Jake Rubin. “It’s not a 20-year project, it’s a five-year project. Our real problem right now, frankly, is not demand – it’s supply.”
Cline’s novel was written in 2011, yet at times it seems scarily prescient. We now have futurisitic theme parks, such as Beijing’s SoReal and VR World in New York, that offer entire universes of multiplayer games in a small space. Google has been showcasing immersive travel tours of global wonders for when StreetView just won’t cut it. And we never need to get crushed in the moshpit again, now that VR concerts – including lounging backstage with Ed Sheeran or downloading a Snapchat lens which will see a Bitmoji version of the singer croon Perfect at you – become more mainstream.
While the hardware to explore virtual worlds advances at lightspeeds, Cline’s seemingly limitless OASIS – described as “hundreds (and eventually thousands) of high-resolution 3D worlds” in which you “never see the same terrain twice” – still seems like the stuff of science fiction. And yet the next generation of gaming is quickly catching up with the fantasy. The controversial space-themed game No Man’s Sky uses algorithms to create “18 quintillion planets to explore”, while the operating system SpatialOS, from London-based startup Improbable, allows for hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.
“The way Cline describes the OASIS is very similar,” says Improbable chief executive Herman Narula. “Developers have always been about selling people a fantasy, and that’s wonderful. But we want to go that one step further: we want to give people real worlds – and, by ‘real’, I mean that their experiences within those worlds can feel meaningful.”
Of course, spending vast chunks of time playing online games is nothing new. World-building game Minecraft has been fuelling marathon gaming sessions for 33 million fans since its release in 2009. Second Life has been rumbling on since 2003, and its creator, Linden Lab, recently released its “social VR” project, Sansar, which allows users to create their own games and locations, including the site of the Apollo moon landing. Altspace VR, though recently forced to close over financial difficulties, created a virtual social network so popular that it has hosted everything from standup comedy gigs to a real-world wedding.
In Ready Player One, players in the OASIS can earn coins to purchase virtual goods (like weapons, cool cars and magic spells), but they can also use their OASIS balance to pay for real things, such as Wade placing a virtual pizza order and getting a slice delivered to his apartment. Thanks to the likes of UberEats and Deliveroo, we’ve been able to order dinner without interacting with an actual human for years now. Similarly, tokens and skins have been traded as virtual currency in gaming for a long time, and players in Second Life have been able to earn real money by selling their virtual items.
While VR currently still requires hardware, AR is already built directly into our smartphones – it’s now ubiquitous and free-to-use. It’s not hard to imagine in the near-future an app that allows you to hover your phone over a restaurant to discover its TripAdvisor rating, just as Wade’s student ID floats above his head.
Although plugging in might seem like we’re switching off socially, a key plotpoint in Ready Player One involves Wade’s avatar Parzival hanging out with other avatars in a virtual chat room called the Basement – and it seems that social spaces will be the next frontier of social media and gaming. The app BigScreen allows you to watch a movie “with” your partner who’s on another continent, or give a presentation to a team in another time zone. Facebook has just rolled out its Spaces app, in which avatars can interact with friends around virtual campfires taking virtual selfies.
But who needs friends when you can already chat to your virtual personal assistant Alexa on an Amazon Echo, ask Siri to send your texts, or complain to an AI chatbot instead of waiting on hold to a call centre. In the next decade we could be jumping in a self-driving car (bagsy a Delorean) and 3D-printing new organs, to be transplanted by an AI robo-surgeon. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will leave his immense fortune hidden in Facebook Spaces. Meet you by the (virtual) campfire.
Ready Player One is in cinemas on 29 March
