ALSO BY DAVID M. EWALT
Of Dice and Men:
The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2018 by David M. Ewalt
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Portions of this book were originally published in Forbes or on Forbes.com.
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Hardcover ISBN: 9781101983713
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Version_1
For my grandfather Michael E. Spinapolice, who bought my first computer
CONTENTS
Also by David M. Ewalt
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: THE SPARK
1. PYGMALION’S SPECTACLES
2. THE ULTIMATE DISPLAY
3. CONSOLE COWBOYS
4. INTO THE RIFT
5. TWO BILLION REASONS
6. TAKING HOLD
7. VR AND CODING IN LAS VEGAS
8. THE ONCOMING TRAIN
9. THIS IS REAL
10. WE’LL USE THE ORGASMATRON
11. MAGICAL THINKING
Epilogue: THE AGE OF THE UNREAL
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Prologue
THE SPARK
It’s 1894, and a twenty-year-old Italian aristocrat pushes a button on his desk, causing a bell to ring on the other side of the room. He wakes his mother in the middle of the night to show her what he’s created. He calls it a wireless telegraph.
It’s 1927, and a twenty-one-year-old Utah farm boy transmits a live image from a camera, through the air, to a glowing screen. “That’s it, folks,” he announces. “We’ve done it—there you have electronic television.”
It’s 2012, and a nineteen-year-old video game fan from California fits a lightweight plastic headset over his eyes, presses a button on a computer, and is transported to another world. “I am making great progress,” he tells his friends later in a post on an Internet forum. “Really excited about this.”
We’ve already entered the age of virtual reality, though you probably haven’t noticed it yet. You’ve almost certainly heard of VR, seen the news stories and magazine covers, read about how it’s the hot new medium for 3-D movies and video games. It’s possible you’ve tried one of the basic VR viewers that use a phone for a screen. Or maybe you’ve played with or own a high-end VR headset that connects to a computer.
But unless you’re one of the handful of people who live on the sharpest point of the cutting edge, you probably haven’t noticed that the release of those gadgets was the dawn of a whole new era. This isn’t just another beat in the accelerating tempo of technological progress; it’s the start of a brand-new song. At the very least, it’s a moment as significant as the birth of radio or television; quite possibly, it’s the beginning of a fundamental change in what it means to be human.
No, seriously.
I know that sounds crazy. But this technology gives us the ability to do crazy things. A virtual reality is a computer-generated environment that you can see and hear, typically through the use of a high-tech headset, so that it appears you’re actually inside the simulation. Good VR even lets the user interact with and change the environment. Now think about that: Creating a whole new world that people can inhabit used to be something only deities could do. The ancient Greeks said Gaia gave birth to the heavens, the sea, and the mountains; in the twenty-first century, an engineer models them on their laptop.
And think about what it means to inhabit one of these virtual worlds. You and I are bound to the physical world—we have to work with the body we have in the place where we are. But as virtual reality simulations get better, both of those limitations start to go away. Suddenly anyone can see what it’s like to stand on the peak of Mount Everest. Or a person who can’t walk can experience a marathon from the perspective of an Olympic champ. And if fantasy is indistinguishable from reality, why stop there? Take a walk across Mars—hell, take a walk across Narnia. Become a dragon and fly through the clouds.
Crazy, right? I don’t know what it will do to humanity when we can experience our fantasies in a manner that’s indistinguishable from real life, but I do know that the invention of this technology is a pretty big deal. When we talk about VR, we’re not just talking about gadgets that play 3-D video games.
* * *
—
In the interest of transparency, I should admit that I’m exactly the type of person you’d expect to get overexcited about VR. When I was a child I was obsessed with fantasy literature, movies, and games. I memorized the maps in books like The Hobbit, knew the name of every obscure Star Wars character, and spent countless hours playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I loved video games too, and I was interested in computer programming. In other words, I was a stereotypical 1980s nerd.
Then I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it blew my adolescent mind like a bolt of neon lightning. In this cyberpunk novel’s dystopian future, hackers transfer their consciousness directly into the Matrix, a virtual reality representation of a global computer network, and explore cyberspace the same way a team of adventurers might delve into a dungeon in one of my D&D games. Gibson’s “console cowboys” navigate traps, fight powerful security programs, and escape with stolen data treasure. A world where you can fight monsters and still be a computer genius? I would have moved there if I could.
I spent my teenage years devoted to anything that had to do with virtual reality. I devoured books written by novelists like Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson, and used my allowance to buy a subscription to Wired magazine. I lost interest in D&D and started playing sci-fi role-playing games like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020, where instead of a knight or a wizard, my character could be a netrunner or a decker. I even paid to see cyberpunk B movies like The Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic in theaters—multiple times. And I spent what little free time I had left on my computer, connecting to dial-up bulletin-board systems with a 2400-baud modem, imagining I had become a console cowboy. I was on the VR bandwagon and couldn’t wait for the future.
But then I got burned. When I was eighteen years old, the Japanese video game company Nintendo announced the Virtual Boy, a portable video game console that could simulate immersive 3-D graphics. It looked like something out of one of my cyberpunk novels—a futuristic headset in red and black plastic. For the better part of a year before it was actually released, TV commercials and articles in Nintendo Power magazine raised my expectations to epic levels. At night I dreamed of video game characters jumping off TV screens and running all around me in glorious virtual reality. When it was finally released, the Virtual Boy cost nearly $200. But I was away at college, so I bought one with the money my parents gave me for textbooks.
It sucked. Oh, sweet Mario of the Mushroom Kingdom, how it sucked. The Virtual Boy had a weird red-and-black monochrome screen that gave me eyestrain and migraines. Th
e graphics weren’t immersive 3-D, they just had an illusion of depth thanks to stereoscopic trickery. And the games were nothing special—pinball, tennis, baseball, nothing that made me feel like I’d been whisked away into another reality. Just a few minutes of play made me want to vomit—half from disgust and half from the pounding headaches.
I was crushed. This gadget was supposed to be my point of entry into a world of VR fantasy, but instead it was just an overpriced View-Master. And I wasn’t alone; consumers around the world hated the Virtual Boy, making it one of the biggest flops in Nintendo’s history. I tossed mine in my closet, and it sat there unused and unloved until the end of the school year, when I sold it rather than bothering to pack it up to take home for the summer.
From that point on, I was a hard-eyed skeptic when it came to the topic of virtual reality. I never stopped enjoying portrayals of virtual worlds in fiction—I think I saw The Matrix four times when it was in theaters. But I was instantly suspicious of any company, scientist, or engineer who claimed to have developed a viable VR product. I kept an eye on developments in virtual reality as I started my career as a technology journalist, but years ticked by without anyone making real progress. Research failed to pan out, consumer products didn’t work, tech demos produced more nausea than converts. I wrote sarcastic blog posts about the few people who were even trying.
And then in 2012, I heard about a nineteen-year-old video game geek from California who had built his own virtual reality headset. His name was Palmer Luckey, and he called it the Oculus Rift. The few people who’d tried it swore it was the real deal—the kid had solved some major technical problems, they said, and his invention provided real immersion into virtual worlds.
I remained skeptical. I’d heard all this before, and besides, the teenage genius tinkering in his parents’ garage was such a Silicon Valley cliché, it had to be hype. But when Luckey’s start-up began selling $300 Rift prototypes on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, I couldn’t help getting a little excited. The campaign was endorsed by a long list of people whose opinions mattered—people like John Carmack, the legendary programmer of video games like Doom, and Gabe Newell, the billionaire owner of video game software developer Valve. When the Kickstarter ended after thirty days, Oculus VR had raised more than $2.4 million—and for the first time in more than a decade, I felt like the dream of VR might actually be moving forward.
* * *
—
I didn’t realize we’d entered the age of virtual reality until almost two years later. By that point, Oculus VR was already a phenomenon. A few months earlier, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had closed a deal to acquire the company for $2 billion, even though it still hadn’t released a commercial product. Oculus was hosting a conference at a hotel in Los Angeles and showing off its latest Rift prototype to a group of software developers, engineers, and designers; I’d been assigned to write a cover story about Palmer Luckey for Forbes magazine, so I was able to get into the event and try out the new headset.
The demo took place in a small room with a slightly raised five-foot-square pad on the floor in the center. An Oculus technician told me to stand on it and explained that I was going to see a series of short scenes designed to show off the Rift’s capabilities and put users into a variety of virtual spaces. As long as I didn’t feel myself stepping off the pad, I could move around and explore, since the system would follow my location and orientation.
Then he handed me the headset—a beveled box of black plastic about seven inches wide, four inches tall, and three inches deep attached to a plastic head strap. The inside surface of the headset was gently curved and padded with foam where it would rest against my face, positioning my eyes directly in front of two convex lenses that would focus my vision on an internal LED screen. The device was surprisingly light and looked vaguely alien. I had the odd sense I was handling something I shouldn’t touch, like an artifact from the future left behind by a careless time traveler.
The technician helped me put on the rig and adjusted it to sit on my head properly, so it felt no more cumbersome than a pair of ski goggles. He pulled headphones down over my ears, and because my vision and hearing were blocked, my other senses were heightened. I remember standing there as I waited for the demo to begin, feeling the air-conditioning blow on the back of my neck, the soft pad beneath my feet, the foam of the headset against my brow.
And then it was all gone, and I wasn’t in a meeting room at a hotel in Hollywood, I was standing on the roof of a building, surrounded by skyscrapers, in the middle of a strange city. It was nighttime, and the towers around me were lit by spotlights and thousands of twinkling windows; above me, low-hanging clouds reflected the city’s light with a sickly crimson glow.
I gazed across the skyline, saw it stretching to the horizon, and felt the place’s size. It wasn’t like looking at a picture of a city, it was like I was actually in the city; it filled my entire field of vision, and had real depth and weight. As I stepped forward, the scene moved with me until I was at the edge of the building; when I looked over, my stomach lurched with genuine vertigo as I gazed down at cars driving on the streets far below.
It felt so real. Sure, the computer graphics weren’t perfectly realistic, but the overall effect was so convincing I forgot I was wearing a VR headset. It felt more like I was there than here—I was on that rooftop looking at that city, not in a demo room staring at a screen a few inches from my eyes.
Then the scene faded to black, and then faded up again, and I found myself in a small sitting room with two plush armchairs on either side of a table set for afternoon tea. There was a gilt-framed mirror on one wall of the room, and when I turned to it, I saw the reflection of a porcelain harlequin’s mask floating in midair. When I leaned toward the mirror for a better look, the mask leaned in too; I tilted my head to one side, and the mask copied the movement. I yelped in surprise—“Oh, that’s me!”
The scene changed again, taking me on a series of short visits to a half-dozen virtual worlds. I stood on the surface of a rocky planet with three moons in the sky and came face-to-face with a friendly green-skinned alien; it seemed so real that when it raised a hand to wave hello, I automatically smiled and waved back at it. I shrunk down to microscopic size and found myself facing a giant, truck-sized mite; basketball-sized pieces of dust and pollen floated through the air, and I walked around them, examining them from all sides. I visited cartoon animals grazing in a pasture. I squeezed into the claustrophobic control room of a dimly lit submarine.
Finally I found myself in an empty corridor with high cathedral ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall. As I looked around the room and tried to figure out where I was, the simulation’s audio kicked in, and I heard a low thump off in the distance, around a corner. Then another, this time closer. Another, closer still, seemed to shake the entire room. Then something stepped around the corner. A massive scaly head, a huge muscled leg, a long powerful tail. A Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the dinosaurs, as big as a bus, coming right toward me.
The parts of my brain responsible for higher reasoning knew this was just a simulation, but the simulation was so realistic it had more primitive parts of my brain utterly convinced. At the sight and sound of a massive predator approaching, some organ that has protected land-based mammals since the Triassic period took over my body, and I learned for the first time how my body handles the fight-or-flight response.
I froze in fear. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight and my heart start to pound in my chest. As the T. rex lumbered toward me, I broke out in a cold sweat. When it stopped about thirty feet away and roared, I could swear I felt its hot breath. It came closer, close enough that I could reach out and touch it, but I still didn’t move an inch. The T. rex bent down, sniffed me, and turned its head to stare at me with a hubcap-sized yellow eye. Then it straightened up, took a step forward, and walked on. My body—still out of my conscious control—fina
lly unfroze when I ducked to let its swinging tail flick over my head.
* * *
—
The demo ended there, but after I lifted the Rift off my head, I took my first steps into another new world. In this reality, VR was fact, not fiction. After decades of false starts and failures, the technology was finally good enough to go mainstream. Unlike so many other VR demos, this one left me feeling excited, not disappointed; perhaps more important, I didn’t feel like I needed to vomit. The Rift was the real deal. Virtual reality for the masses was here.
I sat by the hotel’s outdoor pool and tried to think about the experience like a skeptic, not a fan. I considered that the headset was kind of bulky and made my face feel a little hot after a while. The graphics were comparable to those of most modern video games, but far from perfect—even a high-definition screen appears blocky and pixelated when it’s two inches in front of your eyes. And though I hadn’t seen the computer that was connected to the Rift, I knew it must have been an absolute powerhouse, probably costing thousands of dollars to build. The Rift was a high-end gadget for people with lots of disposable income, not the kind of product the average family would buy and play with in their living room.
But prices would drop and the quality would increase over time. The important fact was, it worked. I’d seen it and now I believed it: VR was going to be a big deal. This was the birth of an industry that will be as big as telephones or television, but will have an even more profound effect on our lives. Forget talking to a faraway relative on your cell phone; imagine interacting with a live virtual person that matches that individual’s appearance, mannerisms, and movements, so it feels like you’re both in the same room. And how can two-dimensional TV and movies compete with immersive VR? Virtual reality entertainment will introduce new avenues of expression and deliver unprecedented levels of realism in art. I always thought Jaws was an amazing movie. Now I was gonna need a virtual boat.
Defying Reality Page 1