virtual reality

  • Soon enough, virtual reality environments may overtake our physical world as the primary locus of our experience, which means every aspect of our environment will have been designed by someone.

    Even today, it is hard to go anywhere that has not been deliberately shaped by human design. The concept of ontological design posits that in the act of designing our environments, we actually design ourselves, as the human mind is shaped greatly by its experiences. Hence there is a continual cycle of shaping between the individual and his environment.

    The earliest opportunity we have to shape our own behavioral algorithms is through the active structuring of our environments. This process allows us to avoid the inputs which trigger unwanted behaviors or ensure that we encounter those that trigger desired behavior. However, the purpose of environmental design does not just lie in avoiding negative cues, but in using cues to condition habits, making us invulnerable to threats when they inevitably come along.

    — Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Ryan A. Bush

  • The Metaverse may be “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds,” but, as we’ve seen, it will be realized through physical hardware, computer processors, and networks. Whether those are governed by corporations alone, governments alone, or decentralized groups of tech-savvy coders and developers, the Metaverse is dependent on them. The existence of a virtual tree and its fall may forever be in question, but physics is immutable.

    — The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

  • Virtual reality will represent another means of hastening social change. People will ultimately be able to have relationships and engage in activities in immersive and highly realistic virtual-reality environments that they would not be able or willing to do in real reality. As technology becomes more sophisticated it increasingly takes on traditional human capabilities and requires less adaptation. You had to be technically adept to use early personal computers, whereas using computerized systems today, such as cell phones, music players, and Web browsers, requires much less technical ability. In the second decade of this century, we will routinely be interacting with virtual humans that, although not yet Turing-test capable, will have sufficient natural language understanding to act as our personal assistants for a wide range of tasks.

    — The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

  • By the end of the decade, we’ll agree the Metaverse has arrived* and it will be worth many trillions. The question of exactly when it started and how much revenue it generates will remain uncertain. Before getting to that point, we will exit the current phase of hype and probably enter and then exit another one, too. The hype cycle will be caused by at least three factors: the reality that many companies will over-promise what sort of Metaverse experiences will be possible and when; the difficulty of overcoming key technical barriers; and the fact that, even when those barriers are overcome, it will take time to figure out exactly what companies should build “in the Metaverse.”

    — The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

  • Platform scale is achieved as internal processes are transitioned to external interactions. Platforms that enable highly efficient and repeatable interactions scale faster than those that do not. As a result, if higher adoption gets in the way of interaction efficiency and repeatability, the platform may lose value with scale.

    — Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

No more stories or excerpts.