By 2020 Snow Crash-style HMDs with 180° FOV and 4K resolution or better will be available to buy or build. HMDs better than the $100,000 Sensics piSight will be affordable for all. If VR isn't mainstream by 2020 then it should be by 2030. By midcentury we'll have built a real holodeck, with even simulated smells and tastes. Eventually VR will be almost perfect. But not quite. VR will never be totally perfect. No matter how advanced it becomes we will still be limited by our physical bodies. Someday VR will give way to SR - simulated reality. You've seen SR in The Matrix. But how will we actually create an SR interface?
The answer is the Vertebrane. In The Day You Discard Your Body, Marshall Brain, HowStuffWorks founder, describes how we will escape the confines of our bodies via an artificial replacement vertebra. The body will be put on autopilot, feeding, grooming, cleaning, and exercising itself, while the mind roams freely across the metaverse. Marshall believes the technology could be available in 40-50 years with an intensive, Manhattan Project-style research project. Further out, he envisions isolated brains living for centuries in brain storage facilities. And ultimately, centuries from now, we'll be uploading our minds into advanced computer systems.
Young people today, and perhaps even middle-aged people, may live to see the Vertebrane become a reality. Medical advances are expected by some scientists to enable people alive today to live to 150 years of age. If that is the case, and brain isolation is developed in that time, that means there are people alive now who will never die - medical advances coupled with the Vertebrane would keep our bodies from dying of disease, age, or accident while we await the development of brain isolation technology, which would increase our lifespan by centuries, as the brain, as long as it does not deteriorate from Alzheimer's or other brain diseases, can live much longer than a normal body, giving us enough time until the holy grail - uploading - becomes available.
The idea of living to see the day when your mind can be uploaded into a computer doesn't seem as absurd once you realize the potential of "stopgap" technologies (and everyone knows technology is advancing at an accelerating pace) to string us along further and further until eventually we reach the ultimate goal - transcending the human condition; the end of death, suffering, scarcity, and physical limitations. What humanity will accomplish over the course of this century will eclipse the myopic visions of mainstream science fiction set centuries or even millennia hence. Mid to late 21st humanity (or transhumanity, as it were) will make the 24th century humans of Star Trek look like the Amish.
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Moore's Law - The Past
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Moore's Law - The Future
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