So, any of you heard of this "Journey to Wild Divine" thing? Someone at work directed me to it in a discussion about virtual reality. Now, we all know I'm gonna be first in line when they start handing out the neural jacks. Make me a brain in a jar, baby! But it's a long way off. Me, I'm holding my breath for something a little more attainable--full-sensory surround VR. It can be done. The hard part isn't the surround, it's the sensory input. Sight and sound are easy, they do simulations utilizing those senses already. Touch is going to be hard, so is smell. Being able to send stimuli to the senses when they're not actually being stimulated is going to require a direct neural link, and as of now the technology (so far as I'm aware) is not up to it. The corrolary is the input from the body to the machine--biofeedback. That's why I bring up this game. There's a lot of touchy-feely meditative Buddhist stuff going on with it, which is fine, but not really what makes me geek out about this. It's the biofeedback that excites me. Being able to control your input to a computer through your internal processes is going to open up a lot of doors, if it hasn't already, to more direct flesh-machine links. I'm not going Matrix with this, don't get me wrong, but you gotta admit this is cool. Besides which, I think most of us in the western world would do with being a little more aware of our circadian rhythms and the way our bodies function on a very visceral level. Anything that provides a way to refine our understanding and control of that, wrapped up in a nice chewy "game-like" coating, gets my vote.
I'm not expecting a lot from this particular incarnation of that idea. But hell, anything that's a start on that road is worth it. I just hope they get the VR up and running before I'm too old to run in the fiber-optic without throwing out me back.
Either way, I want this thing. But the fact that it requires specialized hardware makes it deeply beyond my budget at this point. You know... the budget. The one that means I don't have a fucking dollar for BUS FARE to get down to GameStop, where I will ogle and drool and then cry when I have to walk out of there empty-handed.
Ah, maybe this fall. When those student loans roll in it's gonna be freakin' cheese on crackers all the way. ('Cause right now cheese is a luxury we can't afford.) For now *flips a dime over her shoulder* this one's for my similarly-impoverished student homies.

I just said homies, didn't I?


And I'm gonna need that dime back.

Labels: Technology