‘This game sux’ Anh Dung thought*. Within seconds over 50 likes had appeared beside the text of his thought that had just appeared in his public display.*
‘Wot u playing?’ Radena, his on-again off-again girlfriend for the last month*, asked. Anh opened up Radena’s visual screen*, he could see she had her VR goggles on too and was sitting on a train, it looked pretty packed, he didn’t bother checking her tracker* to see what line she was on. Her online tab* was private at that moment too, she might have been looking at porn* but he couldn’t know for sure.
‘COD VR3*’ he replied.
‘Y’s it suc?’ Radena asked, she opened up Anh’s VR tab and saw that in the game he was running through an underground corridor, he had Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ playing loudly, over which screams and explosions could be heard in the distance.
‘Its got the same glitch as the last game, when ur firing the flamethrower in the rain the raindrops drop right through it’
‘Instead of evaporating?’
‘Y’. ‘Hey’ he added, ‘is that Marziya sitting beside u?’
‘Y’ she replied, she turned her head around slightly so Anh could see Marziya sitting on the train’s window seat better.
‘Can u ask her if she wants to play COD later?’
Anh didn’t bother opening Radena’s audio screen to hear what they said. He could see Marziya turning to face Radena and her expression as Radena asked her. After what seemed like an age to someone used to people sharing their thoughts almost instantaneously she got back to him.
‘N, she’s got tutor’
‘VR or R?’*
Again the wait.
‘R, y?’
‘No reason’
Mohammed chimed in on his earlier thought, ‘I don’t think the flames r hot enough to do that dude’. 20 people instantly liked his status.
Anh, still busy killing Nazis with the flamethrower in the VR game, opened another tab and queried Wikipedia’s problem solving program*. A second later it came back with the answer. Anh linked it to Mohammed, who he could see by opening up his screen was at home in his dining room plugged into his old Flexi. Opening up Mohammed’s VR display it looked like he was sitting in the virtual audience* of some TV talk show Anh didn’t recognise.
‘Here dude, Wikisolver says they should evaporate’
‘Wikisolver’s rubbish, never trust anything that’s free’ Mohammed replied.
‘Ur right, I don’t trust your mum’. Over 100 people liked this, Anh guessed he didn’t even know half of them. Probably random Sudanese kids who’d only had the internet for 6 months*.
Mohammed’s stress meter* spiked slightly, he blocked Anh’s last comment from his parents so they wouldn’t see it the next time they logged in.
‘Whatever’ Mohammed said, then closed his tab to Anh, who had just burned a virtual Goebbels to a crisp.
Radena sent Anh a private message ‘wanna come over tomoz?’
Anh didn’t skip a beat, ‘Y’ he replied as he stepped over Goebbels flaming corpse.*
Radena opened both their schedules and saw he was doing nothing after 5pm the next day. ‘Come by my house about 7?’ she asked.
‘Y’ Anh repeated.
She opened up Anh’s VR game and blew him a kiss. Anh felt it gently on his lips as he ducked behind a wall.
‘C u’ she said.
‘K’ Anh replied as he leapt up and fired the flamethrower directly into Hitler’s face. The Fuhrer screamed in pain before the game ended and a message came up congratulating him on having won the Second World War within his record time.
Anh took his VR goggles off and stood up from the chair in his bedroom he’d been sitting on, he could smell dinner cooking.
*Why bother saying things out loud? Already scientists can tell very broadly what someone is thinking about (or at least how they’re feeling about something) by scanning their brain and seeing what areas exhibit different amounts of activity. Give it 50 years and mindreading technology should be all the rage. The massive potential downsides I won’t cover here though.
*More people online, more time spent online, ergo I think the experience will be a lot more intense and a lot more of whatever ‘likes’ evolve into will be bandied around. Here his 'public display' is just a general name for what could be his Facebook wall.
*I imagine life will be a lot more fast-paced and flexible, including relationships.
*In this case Radena’s ‘visual screen’ is a display of what she is actually seeing (or would be seeing if she wasn't wearing what I have clumsily called ‘VR goggles’, no doubt the next Steve Jobs will give them a fancier name then that). So what I mean by that is that there is a small camera in her goggles facing forwards, looking out at everybody else on the train. We already have CCTV cameras on trains and people can video chat over their laptops on Skype, no doubt they’ll soon have penetrated every aspect of our lives.
*Already people frequently update their location on their facebook status, why not just share your location with select friends all (or most of) the time so they can check where you are anytime?
*Her ‘online tab’ is what she is looking at online through the goggles. There would be displays in front of her eyes whose layout probably won’t change dramatically from computer screens today.
*Give it 40 more years, girls will be looking at porn too, I guarantee you. Equality’s a great thing.
*(Call of Duty Virtual Reality 3)
*Virtual Reality Tutor or real life tutor, the two have become less obviously separable
*Wiktionary, Wikileaks, Wikifashion, why not another Wiki? We already have Wikianswers where users can submit and answer questions. In this case ‘Wikisolver’ is a program that does the same thing but acts as an advanced search engine, where, instead of merely searching for a word or phrase, you ask it a question, even quite a complex one, and it will scour the internet looking for a good answer. This next step in cyberspace should make us even lazier then we are now.
*We already have chatrooms, we can have VR audiences to live TV shows too. ‘The Daily Show’ might in future have 200 people in its studio audience, 5,000 people in its VR audience (who might perceive that they are sitting at a seat in the studio and are displayed on a screen behind the audience or something, though they’re not really there as a hologram or anything, that’s Star Wars you’re thinking of) and millions more merely watching the show on their computers (TVs are already becoming obsolete).
*The internet will eventually spread to Africa’s youth, 20 years ago no one though China would have hundreds of millions of internet users by now.
*Stress meter. Already having health insurance and wearing seat belts in compulsory and millions of people wear glasses or braces. How soon before people have medical devices implanted in their bodies to constantly monitor their health to make sure they’re nice and healthy? This could be greatly expanded upon. Maybe I’ll write some sequels?
*Graphic video game violence, now completely indistinguishable from the real thing in Virtual Reality. Suck on that concerned parent’s councils!
