So basically, this is about the future of VR Gaming. Mainly, if Nervegear was real and the ability to recreate realistic environments and haptics.

So some of you may have watched or read or heard about an anime and manga called Sword Art Online. In it, there is a device called the Nervegear, now the catch in the show was that playing SAO, if you died, you die in real life. Because of the way it is programmed. But in real life, that's not going to happen. Basically, here is an Idea for a real life version of the NerveGear and what it's capabilities and games would be in real life.

So I have been hearing that to experience all senses in the NerveGear would be difficult, and the idea is difficult as well. But I am partial to the Idea, as I absolutely love VIdeo Games and famous Franchises.

So imagine this, a version of Pokemon for the Nerve Gear, the entire region of Kanto is simulated with Tens of Millions of NPCs and hundreds of gyms including 8 Large Shopping-Mall like gyms where you get the gym badges. The game is cel-shaded like in the Pokemon Games to distinguish it from reality, yet all the senses can be experienced in it. The thing is, you don't want it too realistic if it's Pokemon because even though some Pokemon look good realistic, some look creepy realistic. So it would be an evolution from Pokemon Go in that sense.

The capabilities, I reckon, is to create a simulation of the earth with Billions of NPCs, possibly even larger. Possibly entire Galaxies like in No Man's Sky and Elite. Basically I want a machine that can push it to limits, do you think Quantum Computing will help?

The thing is, is Virtual Reality must mean that everything you dream of is possible to do. Including explore the galaxy or Universe like in No Man's Sky(Which may get VR Support sooner than later). To Live in a world different from ours that is realistically or unrealistically populated. Like in Ready Player One or Sword Art Online, "A World of Pure Imagination" as Willy Wonka and the Ready Player One trailer would say.

I'm sorry for rambling, but it's just my theory(A GAME THEORY) on the future of video games.

This has been the premise of hundreds of SciFi books and movies. The concept goes back about a century, maybe longer than that. The Matrix or Total Recall were made in the last few decades. It Conquered The World (thanks MST3K!) was in the 1950s and featured a mind-controlling alien that made everything feel like all was well, living in their own radio-controlled reality that looked like the real thing.

If such a system were real, where your total immersion simulation is indistinguishable from the real world, then it opens up nightmare scenarios and dystopian futures that science fiction writers love.

Games like no man's sky don't simulate the entire galaxy, they only simulate the part that you are able to see at each specific moment.

Same with GTA, or anything else.

As such, for single player experiences, not a lot of computing power is needed.

You could "easily" simulate the entire world for a single player experience on a low powered CPU. Since people usually travel in a continuous area, you only need the immediate data to be available to you. If you are currently in Los Angles, you only need LA on your computer. If I detect you are moving north, I can download San Francisco as well. This is already how things like google earth work.

The real challenge is multiplayer changes to the world. When something changes, I need to communicate all of the changes to everyone else who can observe them. So the biggest challenge is communications.

The amount of communications is determined by the fidelity of the interactions. This is loosely defined by:

1. How many changes per second are occurring?

2. How accurately do you want the players to experience them on different machine? (If a building explodes, does the explosion need to look exactly the same on everyone's machines? Or is the fact that it's gone enough, and each player's machine is free to render it independently, as long as the building is gone at the end?)

So for a game like pokemon go, I assume that the fidelity is very low. It is technically completely within the reach of the current technologies. It would be a major AAA investment though.

But there is the question of game design: A modern metropolis has ~10M people living in it. This is what makes it an interesting place. Are there 10M users for any VR game at the moment? What would you get from simulating the entire world then? Your world would be as scarcely populated (and as boring) as the Sahara desert. Wouldn't it be more interesting to huddle everyone together in a single city?

The second problem is content production: When you produce a giant world with repetitive content, it's usually boring. That's exactly what happened to no man's sky. What's more immersive a random galaxy's of procedural content? Or an island's worth of content (Oblivion/Skyrim) in which there are many hand crafted experiences designed by talented artists.

I can see 2 ways to solve the "boring gigantic world" problem:

The first is to get your community to create content for you. Let people build stuff, and write quests.

The second which might be more futuristic, is to develop an AI that can write interesting non-similar missions and content proceduraly. Something that can produce an interesting stories and NPCs on the fly. That might actually be an interesting tech challenge. I don't think that machine learning is there yet. But there are already ML algorithms writing for newspapers. I wonder when we will start seeing some of them designing interesting game stories... This could be a very interesting research project. It could also benefit other games besides MMOs.

With that technology gaming is pretty much outdated as you'll be abke to have programs that just trigger your dopamine receptors directly. No feeling of accomplishment required 

Here's an interesting philosophical insight which guides my VR design:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

When I design my VR experiences, I try to always ask myself, "What gives this away as being a fake world?" and "How long does it take for me to determine that this world is fake?"
The fewer and fewer "fakeness" indicators a VR experience has, the more closely it resembles reality. The longer it takes for you to find a "glitch in the matrix" so to speak, the more convincing the VR experience. With todays hardware though, we're quite a ways away from perfect immersion.

I think in perfectly immersive VR, we have to capture every sensory input into the brain and override it with a new one. The head mounted displays are a good attempt at capturing sight. Noise cancelling headphones are good for capturing hearing. What about smell, taste and touch? Some people are creating haptic feedback suits for touch, other people are creating warehouses filled with props which you can walk around and touch in VR. Some people are creating thermal variations in objects for touch senses.

One question we should be asking though: If its possible to "jack in" to a persons brain stem to capture and replace all sensory inputs and responses, would we actually want to do that? What could go wrong? I'm all for great VR, but I don't want anything invasive going into my head...

If someone invents a low invasive method for it, then I would say it would have lots of great benefits. I'm not going to rush out for major surgery, but if it is a pop into the doctor for something that's on par with getting a bad finger/toenail pulled, or even just pulling the device out of the box and putting it on like a VR headset, then I'm totally down with such thing after it hits mainstream.

Fully immersive gaming is one thing, but how would you like to "Pop over" to 'climb up mount Everest' for an afternoon? Or hang out with friends/family from around the globe while still making it to your work meeting later that afternoon?

What about usage in injury treatment? If we can intercept neural in/out at the brain stem, then that opens the option for dragoons,... I mean for allowing para/quadriplegics to have full control and sensation of a robotic exoskeleton 

First of all i know that anime SOA and i like it - but like frob already sayd, the idea about all this is very old and gets refreshed all the time.

There are really good movies out there, showing what can happen, what are the possibilites of such technologies etc:

- Surrogate

- The 13 floor (My favorite)

- The matrix

Also SOA was not first anime bringing that up, it was .hack sign and SOA are a good copy of that - just to make that clear that SOA is another refresh as well.

I expect in 20 years we have something similar than that, but it will be massive in size like in that 13 floor movie and requiring a monster server farm and will be extremely expensive. But the technology we have right know is far from that.

We know so little about our brain, about the human body in general, especially when it comes to small internals. There are so many diseases which are still not cureable...

1. As soon as you "leave the couch" (replace with "leave the office chair" for PC gaming), you get into the areas of "tiring activities". Yes, you can run for hours... if you are physically fit and really ready to put up with all the sweat and time investment to get physically fit. Yes, as soon as you get into "nervegear territory" and no longer need to move your body - you shortcut the brain to see a "different reality" and sever the connection to your physical body - you are no longer really in need of physical fitness... but you can bet that the expierience would be REALLY mentally tiring.

You also will start to encounter new phenomenas that would make you probably not want to live through realistic shooter expieriences or horrorgames in a VR game that is indistinguishable from reality... SOA alludes to it (if it was a better series, it would do way more than just show it in short burst at the beginning to then go back to a boring story about teenage love and a mary sue character).

You would probably get into the area of PTSD being induced by your horrific VR war scenarios, or psychosis triggered by to real horror games. Really, for most soldiers its not a question IF they develop a posttraumatic stress disorder... the question is how long it takes until they can no longer function in a warzone... or, even worse, normal society.

Yes, there are people that can avoid that. They are mostly psychopaths. You are born with it. And you probably will end up in jail or dead, if you don't hide it well (and become rich and famous thanks to our current society being the ideal playground for psychopaths that can play by the law).

You probably can make all kind of interesting and cool alternative reality expieriences... they will be quite boring after a while, and resemble real life pretty close (you know, the game with awesome graphics but really crappy content)... unless our world has gone to shit until then, the question remains "why even bother?"....

You can probably make some high adrenaline scenarios resembling current action games that are really exciting and immersive. But you only ever want to consume it in very short bursts, because they might be physically taxing, and they almost certainly will be mentally distressing.

2. I am not getting into the "WHY???" when it comes to your quite out there numbers of NPCs and stuff to simulate... lets just say when it is hard to create HUNDREDS of NPCs that are not an indistinguishable mess, billions of NPCs randomly generated would be just pointlessly same-ish. Might as well create one thousand and copy and paste them to the world, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The human mind, at its best, can keep track of maybe 100 other human beings on a personal level. Everyone beyond that is just part of a number in a statistics. By the time you meet your 101st NPC for example you will not care anymore, or you start to forget about your first NPC (or probably your tenth, the first might staying in your mind longer) you met in the game.

But now I do get into the why... so lets get back on track.

No, Quantum computing will probably not help. Unless you want to "simulate" your billion of NPCs in a very simple way. Name, age, height, thats it. As soon as they should actually have a simulated "life" of any real depth, you will need an array of Processors beyond what any supercomputer in the world has, even with some shiny new quantum computing tech that REALLY delivers on the hyperbole (and as usual, the reality will never live up to the hype). You probably waste billions of dollars on the hardware and hefty sum in needed energy each month just to run a coarse simulation for a billion boring virtual lifes. Again, probably not worth it beyond the "for the heck of it" science e-peen.

Getting back to the "WHY???" I wanted to avoid: As fun as pokemon might be on a smaller scale, there are only so many randomly generated pokemons you can create before you have seen it all... there are just so many NPCs you can cram into a VR World before they start blend together into a boring mass of "meh!". I think the draw of the current AR pokemon craze is the AR part. The fact that pokemons are hidden in the real world (and the thrill of being in danger of falling down the cliffside with permadeath). For one, it is questionable what a simulated world to replace the already highdef realworld would really add to that game, when you can just omit crunching a whole lot of data by using what is already there. Especially with a game like pokemon, that does not rely on highdef graphics to sell itself, thus the AR discrepancy between simulated pokemon and real world is not really that much of a problem. Expecially with a game that is a collectathlon with most of the "garnish" of other games removed (yes, you can have monster fights with your collectable items... yes there is an actual game world to collect the items in. Compared to other games that layer IMO is pretty thin).

As much as a SOA like Virtual world sound awesome, as much as you could build really fantastic and exciting worlds... there is only so much the human brain can take, and what is awesome and exciting in short burst for 80 hours becomes boring and dreary once you hit the 1000 hour mark. Yes, there are the WoW addicts... but these people are wasting way too much time in a virtual world for a reason... mostly they have trouble with the real world (maybe social anxiety problems and stuff like this), or other addiction problems. Are they happy in their alternate reality.... hell, yes, I guess they have to get something out of it. I would be the last one to judge people for wasting all their free time in a virtual reality... as long as they still work for a living, that is.

But the general mass audience will probably never stick around for that long in a world that starts to resemble the real world as soon as the novelty of the fantasy / sci-fi setting wears off, and the handcrafted content is used up... procgen random quests and worlds and items will start to bore them quickly. As long as your real world situation is not really shitty for one reason or another, of course. If our realworld turns into a dystopia, the VR world might be the better alternative.

The really interesting case study is rather Second life than AR Pokemon, or Sci-Fi stuff like SOA. As soon as the virtual world can be used for more than entertainment, it might be able to tie people to the virtual reality for longer. If you can work in VR, socialize in VR and, yes, play for a short time in VR, people might actually start "living" in the VR world the same way some addicts do nowadays in some MMO games.

Will this be for the better or worse of society? Will it be anywhere near as fantastic as the hype makes you believe, or in the end just a pedestrian as most other new technology when it finally arrives? Who knows. But I think a little bit moderation of expectation instead of overblown hype is in order at this stage.