KurzweilAI.net,
Nov. 2, 2002
Nanotechnology-based visualization technologies will allow people to be someone else in virtual reality in the future, Ray Kurzweil said in his Capstone address on "Visualization and Human-Machine Interaction in the 21st Century" at IEEE Visualization 2002 in Boston on November 1.
Kurzweil presented a scenario involving a direct connection between the human brain and nanobot-based implants for communicating between the analog world of neurons and the digital world of electronics.
"For full-immersion virtual reality, we will send billions of these nanobots to take up positions by every nerve fiber coming from all of our senses," he said. "If you want to be in real reality, they sit there and do nothing. If you want to be in virtual reality, they suppress the signals coming from our real senses and replace them with the signals that you would have been receiving if you were in the virtual environment.
"In this scenario, we will have virtual reality from within and it will be able to recreate all of our senses. These will be shared environments, so you can go there with one person or many people. Going to a website will mean entering a virtual reality environment encompassing all of our senses, and not just the five senses, but also emotions, sexual pleasure, humor.
"You will also be able to have different bodies for different experiences. Just as people today project their images from web cams in their apartment, people will beam their whole flow of sensory and even emotional experiences out on the web, so you can, as in the plot concept of the movie 'Being John Malkovich,' experience the lives of other people."
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