I read Ready Player One for the first time a couple of months ago, and I loved it. It’s unashamedly packed with references to 1980s games, films and TV shows, and it even feels like a good old-fashioned eighties hero fantasy movie in the way it’s structured. The fact that Steven Spielberg has signed on to direct the film version seems too perfect for words.
It got me thinking though – what with all of the hoo-hah about VR at the moment, how near are we to creating a persistent online VR world like the OASIS in Ready Player One? We’ve got pretty decent VR headsets now – things that were only on the drawing board when the book was written about five years ago – but what about all the haptic gizmos that Wade uses in the book? And would a persistent, online VR world even be possible with current technology?
It was fun finding out, and I wrote it all up for this article for Kotaku UK:
How Far Away is the Technology of Ready Player One?
I was particularly bemused by the crazy force feedback chair that someone has developed to play racing games – and the ultrasound-based Haptoclone is just spooky, frankly. But lag seems to be the main thing that would hold up an online VR world right now – broadband needs to improve before we can all lose ourselves in the OASIS…
Buy Ready Player One
A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME 