Location:  Orientation Island #4, Mentoring

It’s a scene I cannot get out of my mind, all these years after seeing The Matrix: Neo awakes from our world into the real one to find himself naked, bald, feeble, and immersed in a tank of saline solution.  He’s the pawn of computers using him and the rest of humanity as a source of power.  Meanwhile, inside everyone’s heads, the computers project a vast cybernetic hallucination that we consider real.

I wonder how far we might be from that sort of virtual reality, where we’ll at least don special suits and use equipment to modify our bodies.  Readers my age will cringe at this, thinking such immersion is for younger people. But consider how quickly people of many ages embrace elective “cosmetic” surgery and other modifications to alter a thus-far inexorable aging process.

Now we have voice in Second Life. What senses will we enable next? Will we use body-suits? Electrodes? Some immersive toy like the VirtuSphere, pictured with this entry? Will we, at some point, have images piped directly into our minds, as in Neo’s world? 

My time as a Linden Lab mentor, though brief, tells quite a story.  I hear tales of those who stay in-world for 12 or more hours daily…and I wonder if they could tell you when they last watched a sunset. As much as I love the virtual world, and as much it offers an amazing social and educational outlet, I do wonder.

Will virtual worlds be our next societal addiction?  Will we see an epidemic of addictions as we did to heroin in the 70s or crack in the 90s?  I know we already have support groups for those addicted to online games. But virtual worlds offer something vastly different and more seductive.  They offer the chance to rebuild a life, or live an alternate life, in a setting almost completely of one’s own making.

That is a very powerful drug.  How many millions would choose to live in the Neo’s saline tank, instead of our uncertain real world?

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

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