Are there truly virtual worlds in existence?

April 8, 2006 10:52 AM

Are there real/virtual worlds yet?

Does this yet exist, in any rudimentary fashion: A game or other 'real world overlay' where the people involved travel in real space with visual and audio input that comes from the game, and where the game uses some method to track their real world location and interactions with others.

Ie. A bunch of people put on their helmets, view the world through eyepieces (completely or mostly hiding the real world), and stumble around on a flat surface interacting with the virtual world and other people with helmets on.

If it does exist, in a simplistic fashion, who is doing it and are there videos of people as they 'live' in this virtual world for short periods?

posted by Kickstart70 to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Try Second Life. Its a massive multiplayer online role playing game with no real objectives but to wander around virtual reality. Everything you want to build is possible, any action you want to perform is programmable. It doesnt represent actual places in the real world, and you don't wear a helmet, but either way its still has users that spend more time and money in the virtual world than they do in the "real" world. If you've got a PC with decent specs and a relatively quick internet connection you should download it, wander around and talk to people about how they use their virtual world.
posted by pwally at 11:01 AM on April 8, 2006

Second Life isn't anything like what you're asking about. What you're looking for isn't a true virtual world, but something more like reality+ (or virtual+).

I get dibs on reality+ as a trademark. Unless someone is already using it.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:34 AM on April 8, 2006

We built the rudiments of this in ActiveCampus.
posted by rbs at 11:36 AM on April 8, 2006

The kids TV show Knightmare was a bit like this - except that the person negotiating the real world was more or less blinded, and only their team mates could see them in the CGI-enhanced virtual world.
posted by teleskiving at 12:03 PM on April 8, 2006

This is what's called "augmented reality" or "embodied virtuality." I'm not aware of any game applications for this, but I have heard that Boeing uses (or tested) something like this where people working on wiring-harness looms would wear special glasses showing an overlay of how the wires should be laid out. And I think this has been used at least experimentally in surgery.
posted by adamrice at 12:37 PM on April 8, 2006

Real-life Pacman.
posted by Lotto at 12:57 PM on April 8, 2006

You might be able to make a case for Alternate Reality Games being somewhat relevant. I seem to remember that when that "I Love Bees" thing was happening that the people involved were traveling to real-world locations to get clues, but it was all wound up in a fictional reality that didn't actually exist.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:10 PM on April 8, 2006

I looked up "reality+" because of my post above, and I found a blog entry using that term that talks about something close to what you're looking for.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:19 PM on April 8, 2006

I have a friend who's researching this at Georgia Tech. Here's a page about one experience, with an image of a participant wearing all of the gear (gps, camera, headphones, laptop to power everything and store the recorded bits).

There's an augmented reality room they've set up on campus that tracks position (via a camera that faces upward and reads barcodes on the ceiling). The room has real furniture and fixtures (lamps, couches, barware, etc.), and the participant interacts with virtual characters that he or she sees through a head-mounted display (it's like seeing through a video camera, but then the system places the virtual actors into the feed).

So, um, yes. But only in very limited spaces. Doing this "loose" in the world is beyond the reach of today's tech: you can't get the virtual stuff to overlap / interact perfectly with the real stuff due to "registration error."
posted by zpousman at 9:03 AM on April 9, 2006

You could contact that student -- he's got videos of people watching other people play in the augmented reality space... The videos are not online yet, but I saw them at a talk he gave last week.
posted by zpousman at 9:15 AM on April 9, 2006