HBO released a new version of “Westworld” based on the old movie about a robot-based western theme park. The show hasn’t excited me yet — it repeats many of the old tropes on robots/AI becoming aware — but I’m interested in the same thing the original talked about — simulated experiences for entertainment.
The new show misses what’s changed since the original. I think it’s more likely they will build a world like this with a combination of VR, AI and specialty remotely controlled actuators rather than with independent self-contained robots.
One can understand the appeal of presenting the simulation in a mostly real environment. But the advantages of the VR experience are many. In particular, with the top-quality, retinal resolution light-field VR we hope to see in the future, the big advantage is you don’t need to make the physical things look real. You will have synthetic bodies, but they only have to feel right, and only just where you touch them. They don’t have to look right. In particular, they can have cables coming out of them connecting them to external computing and power. You don’t see the cables, nor the other manipulators that are keeping the cables out of your way (even briefly unplugging them) as you and they move.
This is important to get data to the devices — they are not robots as their control logic is elsewhere, though we will call them robots — but even more important for power. Perhaps the most science fictional thing about most TV robots is that they can run for days on internal power. That’s actually very hard.
The VR has to be much better than we have today, but it’s not as much of a leap as the robots in the show. It needs to be at full retinal resolution (though only in the spot your eyes are looking) and it needs to be able to simulate the “light field” which means making the light from different distances converge correctly so you focus your eyes at those distances. It has to be lightweight enough that you forget you have it on. It has to have an amazing frame-rate and accuracy, and we are years from that. It would be nice if it were also untethered, but the option is also open for a tether which is suspended from the ceiling and constantly moved by manipulators so you never feel its weight or encounter it with your arms. (That might include short disconnections.) However, a tracking laser combined with wireless power could also do the trick to give us full bandwidth and full power without weight.
It’s probably not possible to let you touch the area around your eyes and not feel a headset, but add a little SF magic and it might be reduced to feeling like a pair of glasses.
The advantages of this are huge:
- You don’t have to make anything look realistic, you just need to be able to render that in VR.
- You don’t even have to build things that nobody will touch, or go to, including most backgrounds and scenery.
- You don’t even need to keep rooms around, if you can quickly have machines put in the props when needed before a player enters the room.
- In many cases, instead of some physical objects, a very fast manipulator might be able to quickly place in your way textures and surfaces you are about to touch. For example, imagine if, instead of a wall, a machine with a few squares of wall surface quickly holds one out anywhere you’re about to touch. Instead of a door there is just a robot arm holding a handle that moves as you push and turn it.
- Proven tricks in VR can get people to turn around without realizing it, letting you create vast virtual spaces in small physical ones. The spaces will be designed to match what the technology can do, of course.
- You will also control the audio and cancel sounds, so your behind-the-scenes manipulations don’t need to be fully silent.
- You do it all with central computers, you don’t try to fit it all inside a robot.
- You can change it all up any time.
In some cases, you need the player to “play along” and remember not to do things that would break the illusion. Don’t try to run into that wall or swing from that light fixture. Most people would play along.
For a lot more money, you might some day be able to do something more like Westworld. That has its advantages too:
- Of course, the player is not wearing any gear, which will improve the reality of the experience. They can touch their faces and ears.
- Superb rendering and matching are not needed, nor the light field or anything else. You just need your robots to get past the uncanny valley
- You can use real settings (like a remote landscape for a western) though you may have a few anachronisms. (Planes flying overhead, houses in the distance.)
- The same transmitted power and laser tricks could work for the robots, but transmitting enough power to power a horse is a great deal more than enough to power a headset. All this must be kept fully hidden.
The latter experience will be made too, but it will be more static and cost a lot more money.
Yes, there will be sex
Warning: We’re going to get a bit squicky here for some folks.
Westworld is on HBO, so of course there is sex, though mostly just a more advanced vision of the classic sex robot idea. I think that VR will change sex much sooner. In fact, there is already a small VR porn industry, and even some primitive haptic devices which tie into what’s going on in the porn. I have not tried them but do not imagine them to be very sophisticated as yet, but that will change. Indeed, it will change to the point where porn of this sort becomes a substitute for prostitution, with some strong advantages over the real thing (including, of course, the questions of legality and exploitation of humans.) read more »