Virtual Reality is about the right to have certain experiences. It's the ultimate resistance against what might well be an infinitely evil universe. Cheating physics is the hardest goal, because you also have to cheat yourself.
Mankind's greatest achievement will be driven by his strongest emotions.
Most males would love to be left alone with a celebrity starlet for something they could never ever get permission to do in reality. VR may correct the world's extremely unfair distribution of opportunities, the outrageous imbalance between supply and demand in an ever decaying universe.
First of all, it will compensate for Earth's gigantic (but apparently taboo) man-surplus: based on the latest combined census estimates, there are twice as many men who can become fathers than women who can become mothers. It's already too late to avoid violent tensions in India and China. Europe is being flooded by millions of Middle-Eastern men, while American evangelicals are importing a hundred thousand African boys. Because of newer types of polygamy and serial monogamy (Alpha, Beta, Omega males), many more men may have to stay celibate in the coming years and decades. Again, this is a hyper taboo that cannot be discussed or even mentioned.
VR sex will prove as challenging to achieve as "winning" the Cold War, perhaps equal in difficulty and scope to Artificial Intelligence. All it will take is a lot of numbers rapidly placed in the right order. A one-dimensional string of DNA is sufficient to program an entire sperm whale.
VR will turn two dimensional images and cross-sections into 4D flexible objects. The type of body someone would like to have sex with can be represented as a polygon with many layers: a surface map, color map, pressure map, temperature map.
The simplest VR system involves one-point manipulation, like poking someone with a stick. The 2D version will be like groping Jennifer Lawrence through a sheet. User feedback could be through special bodysuits covered with pixel-sized actuators or tiny springs and hinges.
A 2.5 dimensional 'carpet' interface could be made of intersecting wires constantly recalculating their shapes. Each wire could fold at multiple points. The carpet's texture could be altered with small electrical charges at wire intersections, which could also control its rigidity.
Early VR software won't be fully interactive, but more like a 3D movie with optional viewpoints. The simplest version is entirely visual; ultra-high-resolution images designed to override the other senses. With sufficient detail, it could feel like floating in a new reality.
To compensate for today's slow hardware, early VR will have to invent clever illusions. The user's imagination must fill the gaps. Instead of the full-motion gyroscope frames and pressure/feedback outfits seen in the Stephen King film 'Lawnmower Man' (users could be trapped inside such a device without even realizing it), much simpler systems will be used at first.
A hammock-like device could simulate acceleration by tilting the user, with various pressures simulated by restraints.
Physical sensations would be much weaker than in reality, the way a television screen is thousands of times dimmer than natural sunlight. Too much reality could be distracting.
Body motions would be reduced in scope. Users might barely move their arms while handling close-up objects, or operate small footpads for walking. Bodysuits could simulate nakedness. Weighing under two hundred grams, the groin attachment will not be the easiest component.
More sophisticated VR will require almost organic-looking devices. When not in use this equipment will magically stow away.
Calculating digital realities to the smallest detail will be easier than translating that data into something like a "virtual force field" surrounding the user. Feedback forces will be concentrated at the joints and the extremities.
It could be like being wrapped in foam, or millions of tiny tentacles. Simulated skin pressure could be provided by inflatable bladders, heaters, and low voltage currents in dynamic fabric. The support matrix should become unnoticeable.
Other systems may submerge users in buoyancy tanks, hang them from cables, use rubber needle beds, suspension webs, perhaps levitation magnets, or place them in a morphable hamster ball: in a few steps the ceiling becomes the wall becomes the floor, plus the outline of whatever objects the user may encounter.
Solid objects could also be recreated by a telescoping stack of concentric ribbons of self-adjusting length and shape, over a radiating framework of support pins.
Over time, humans will merge with improving VR technology, perhaps helped along by drugs. Electrodes may stimulate muscles to contract, or make them feel as if they're moving. After a few decades, true brain/machine interfaces will be invented.
Simulated sex will be VR's 'killer app', though the concept is too vague and controversial to discuss yet. It could change society so much that the politicians will try to ban it. Marriages and birth rates could further decline in the West.
For these changes to happen, a prototype would have to be demonstrated first. As of 2023, such a device remains impossibly far off.
It's mostly but not entirely technical. The program's human element will have to simulate an evolving 'relationship' with a VR-person who doesn't actually exist. Sex simulations will include elaborate plots, spawning a content industry with thousands of customizable scripts.
Clearly, simulated sex partners will be unbelievably more attractive than real people who are mostly very ugly. Obvious fitness cues include waist to hip ratio, skin smoothness, color gradients, facial features indicating youth and optimum health; but also hidden fitness signals from the observer's imagination. Men would like to date super-babes who are genetically far superior yet unaccountably attracted to them. For women, the great promise of VR sex is that they may be harassed and assaulted less often by men.
Future celebs may earn fortunes by allowing their bodies to be scanned at ultra-resolution. They would essentially be paid lifetime's wages to hold still for a few minutes. There may still be a shortage of candidates to provide such intimate data.
Instead of replacing sexual partners, VR could also make existing ones appear thinner, more symmetrical, and less blemished by time. Merely digitally simplifying people could make them more attractive.
Many online relationship 'partners' will never meet in real life, but exist only as virtual personas carefully maintained by real people far uglier than their simulated bodies.
The above is also described in more detail in the author's short SF story 'VRSEX'.
The best hard SF novel ever? Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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