Ignore body suit. Just hook up your clamps, or nanochips, or transcranial EM stimulation device, or whatever to the raw brain and have it transmit necessary data! Can we do it today? No. Can we do it at some point in the future? Who can tell? But extrapolating a flat zero line from our current inability to achieve whatever strikes me as pretty backwards.
Lord, I hope so! When the capacity inevitably becomes available to substitute full-sensorium fictional realities in place of actual reality, at least half the population will become living zombies in IV-and-catheter meatlockers, and that’s REALLY going to make traffic and getting things done a breeze. 
Elaborating a bit on my previous answer to Darren Garrison: While it’s true that our sensory data are composed or synthesized from millions of readings from nerve endings, the total set of those latter are not the final product that reaches our level of consciousness. Take for example the case of you inadvertently dipping your right hand into boiling water! The “readout” is nothing like a million temperature readings! It’s more like RIGHT HAND DAMAGE WITHDRAW IMMEDIATELY update DAMAGE THERMAL WAVE HAND FRENETICALLY IN AIR TO COOL also LOOK FOR COLD WATER if not found CRY OUT LOUD FOR HELP! And this message is the only thing a VR-transmitter would have to reproduce.
We speculate about future technologies all the time on the Dope, but when it comes to VR there’s always someone (perhaps it’s Darren Garrison every time?) who insists that we ground it in what’s technologically possible today.
We already have neural implants; they’re very crude but to speculate that they may be much more sophisticated in the (far) future is a far cry from MAGIC. As mentioned above, such implants do not need to input the complex models that the brain generates, just the signals that the brain uses to construct those models.
Perhaps the resistance to talking about such possibilities are because of just how much impact they will have. Compelling virtual environments are not something you’ll just log in to now and then, when you feel like dressing as Napoleon (like the TNG holodecks).
A lot of our actions are ultimately, indirectly, about trying to achieve certain experiences, and having direct control over some of our experiences would be an absolute game-changer. Not the end of humanity, but a very different way of living.
I‘ve heard quite a lot of hype that we will have full immersion VR soon like in our lifetime is it true?
No, the resistance is from people that actually know a little about the limits of physics and the complexities of biology and realize to wave something away as “just an engineering problem” is a childlike fantasy.
We have to distinguish between two things:
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The VR we already have, games, VR headsets, etc.
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‘Conscious computers’, ‘uploading the brain’, ‘brain-computer interfaces’.
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This will continue to improve. It will become more powerful and more a part of our lives. The technology will develop. The level of detail on VR screens will improve and become closer to reality. Some additional sensory feedback technology for touch, in addition to hearing and sight, may become practical. This means VR gloves, chairs, rooms, etc.
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This is the realm of fantasy and wishful thinking.
We are not even remotely close to understanding how even a single neuron works, nor will we ever be in the foreseeable future. Each neuron has tens of thousands of complex proteins and molecules, and incredibly intricate electro-chemical processes. There is no conceivable physical method to record the state of even a single living neuron. Never mind 100 billion of them and all their rapidly changing interactions. Nor does the brain exist in isolation from the whole body. It is completely integrated with the whole physiology. Even if we did have the means to record and simulate the states of neurons and all relevant physiological processes, the combined computing power of the whole world would not be sufficient to simulate even the brain of an ant.
Our knowledge of the brain through scans, EEG, etc. can be compared to holding a microphone 2000 feet above a city, recording the traffic noise, and trying to figure out the details of what is happening in the city. Existing brain-computer interfaces are at the level of ‘if you can direct more traffic through this large suburb, we can record the increase in noise there and do something with that information’.
Of course we can’t say what new physics and technology may be available in the future. Maybe there will be antigravity, and transporter beams, and hyperdrive spaceships, and time machines, and consciousness uploads. Maybe we will also discover the technology to observe fairies at the bottom of the garden. For the moment all of these are nothing but fantasy.
Yes, to elaborate on the supposition: the prospect of full-immersion, full-sensory VR is to run wires throughout the whole brain, connect some sort of chips to billions of neurons and have them spoof signals from the entirety of the nervous system into those neurons. (Which would necessitate not only electrical pulses but also the release of a variety of signaling molecules.) It would do this without interfering with real nerve inputs and be biocompatable enough to not cause negative effects and to last a lifetime. This surgery placing billions of components throughout the volume of the brain will be safe, easy, and cheap enough that people will elect to do it so that they can play games.
I’m betting that we will find the garden faries first.
Are you going to engage with what I actually said?
Crude neural implants exist today, for example various kinds of visual prosthesis, so what exactly is your objection to the speculation that in, say 50-100 years such implants may become sophisticated to the point of approximating normal vision?
There’s a bit of a bait-and-switch there.
If you lump those things in one block and say we’re nowhere near to solving all the of the block, then fine I agree with you.
But looking at neural implants as a discrete element, well, like I say, they already exist in crude form. Because providing fake input to the brain is not the same thing as reverse-engineering or simulating the brain itself.
Yes it’s still incredibly difficult work. But the field of neuroscience is advancing rapidly. 50 years ago if we wanted to view the brain in vivo, we’d drain the ventricles of CSF and pump in air, in a painful and dangerous procedure that produced shitty images. It’s incredible the advances that have been made in the intervening decades.
We already live in vr.
Cell phones, computers, mp3 players, televisions, gaming consoles, etc.
People spend most of their time interacting with these things already.
Like right now.
Vision and hearing are the easy things. To get “full-immersion VR” that is “almost indistinguishable from reality” you need the other senses I mentioned. Scents. Taste. Pressure. Friction. Temperature. Pain. Movement. Orientation. Limb position. You need to be able to virtually hold a virtual bowl of ice cream and virtually feel the virtual pressure and virtual cold in your virtual hand and the virtual strain in your virtual arm muscles. You need to virtually feel the virtual shape of the virtual spoon as you virtually lift it to your virtual mouth. You need to virtually feel the virtual cold and virtual texture and virtually taste the virtual ingredients in your virtual mouth. You need to virtually feel it virtually flow down your virtual esophagus, and virtually feel virtual satiation once you have virtually finished the virtual bowl. That is full-immersion VR, not a pair of high-resolution monitors and a couple of microphones on a helmet.
Yes I do. My point still stands. Much of our days are spent interacting with a digital universe because the digital universe is more fulfilling than real life in front of us.
Are you not conflating digital and virtual? How is using digital technology inherently virtual? Is listening to a vinyl record played through an analog sound system real life, but listening to an mp3 from an iphone using bluetooth headphones constitutes virtual reality? Is the number 4 written with a pencil on paper real, and the number 4 entered and displayed on a calculator fake?
People have been using analog technologies to “escape” real life for a long time. Books, records, tapes, theater, film, board games, inflatable sex dolls, and alcohol are all analog. Would you argue that such analog virtual reality is morally superior to what you call the “digital universe?”
Virtual reality is a marketing term for CG stereo video with limited user agency. It does not constitute an actual alternative reality any more than someone playing a synthesizer and listening with stereo headphones.
I’ll imagine that the streets will be empty once we get full immersion VR
But again, I don’t think making it indistinguishable from reality (to all senses) is really the point.
If you had vision, hearing and touch, then the VR will already have the impact on society that I suggested upthread, it doesn’t need (and probably shouldn’t) trigger all senses.
And consider vision separately for a moment. If we’re directly sending input to the optic nerve then we in principle could give the user vision far more vivid than normal vision through human eyes, because eyes have a number of limitations and weaknesses.
So even if when you’re in the VR you know it’s not reality because it doesn’t include pain (which would arguably be a feature, not a bug), it wouldn’t feel like a poor facsimilie of the real world either, because for one thing your vision would be sharper.
What makes you think we’re not all already living in VR? And the VR we’ve devised will be like a dream within a dream.
You talk about the optic nerve as though it’s similar to a cable to video camera. It’s false analogies like this between biological systems and computer technology that are the root of the whole problem.
The interesting thing about the brain is that it can adapt to stimuli. So even if the data coming in from a video camera/optic nerve interface was not the same as the input from the eye, over time the brain could adapt to it and learn to interpret it. Neural plasticity will almost certainly allow artificial inputs to deliver a more detailed picture of the world than we currently get from our natural senses (including wavelengths and sounds which are inaudible, as well as augmented reality information of various kinds).
Humans as hunter/gatherers are adapted very well to living in an information rich environment. I’m certain that entirely new information-rich environments will become available in due course, thanks to neural-interface technology. I wouldn’t guarantee that someone who is habituated to these augmented sense inputs would be able to easily revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle without them, but that is already the case for many habitual computer-jockeys in the present day.
Right. If you want to use a computer analogy, the optic nerve is a bundle of from several hundred thousand to a couple of million wires running to the brain, each of which carries partially processed data from one pixel. If you want to make human vision “more vivid”, you have to redesign the whole visual system from end to end, plus reconstruct the skull to accommodate a much larger visual cortex, and the circulatory system to keep it cool and fed.