Published in 2011, Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One soon became a bestseller with the main movie studios fighting for its rights to make a movie, and launched its author to stardom. The novel tells the adventures of a teenager Wade Watts, disillusioned with the real world, which only finds happiness and fulfillment when it delves into the multiple universes of "Oasis", a virtual reality advanced device.
The story takes place in 2044, but many applications are emerging making Oasis seem to be available much sooner than anyone imagined. In the last year, virtual reality staged an unprecedented revolution: There is no business & technology expo that does not show progress in this field as a central commitment to attract attention; secretive startups of the industry are achieving amazing capitalizations of more than one billion dollars and all "experiential" business (entertainment, tourism, pornography, food) are taking risk to be deeply modified by this new set technologies.
So far we used to think of VR and AR experiences through the senses of sight and hearing; more in the area of entertainment, video games and movies, but there are already devices that combine all the senses. One of the most amazing projects in this line is the Project Nourished, a firm where engineers, designers, nutritionists and chefs work and aim to launch the market soon virtual experiences of gastronomy: using a vegan sustitute meal and through tech devices to simulate different taste, smell and texture (in addition to the vision of another food), one can have the feeling of eating sushi or chocolate cake. Thus, a celiac could once again enjoy bread or bills, a diabetic sweet food.
Technology somehow "hacks" our brain, and brings endless possibilities. Playing with Messi on the Santiago Bernabeu stadium or moving to ancient Egypt without leaving home, is no longer science fiction. This is the vision behind the phenomenal capitalization of Magic Leap, one of the tech companies most secretive of Silicon Valley, that without a product on the market finished got to round C investment series of over one billion Dollars.
Nowadays, initiatives as Holoportation are aimed at achieving communication with holographic projection and technologies as Tango have placed the augmented reality in our pocket, but major technology companies are also betting on further integration of virtual or augmented reality and the world of creativity. Tilt Brush is a Google project to enable artists to create their works in virtual environments. SculptrVR is a company that puts whoever in a "Minecraft environment type" where you can create anything with the tools you have and then print it in 3D, and through its initiative "Augmented Creativity", Disney is working on a hologram to see what is being drawn in real time.
The division between the real and the virtual is increasingly more diluted and the possibilities are exciting. Nothing very far from Cline's novel panorama painting.
