Virtual reality companies look to science fiction for inspiration
Tech companies have spent years developing better, cheaper devices to immerse people in digital worlds. Yet they are still figuring out how to make virtual reality the kind of technology that people cannot live without.
So for inspiration, they turn to science fiction.
At Oculus, a leading virtual reality company, a copy of the popular sci-fi novel “Ready Player One” is handed out to new hires. The name of Microsoft’s HoloLens headset is a salute to the holodeck, a “Star Trek” simulation room.
“Like many other people working in the tech space, I’m not a creative person,” said Palmer Luckey, 23, a co-founder of Oculus, which was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. “It’s nice that science fiction exists because these are really creative people figuring out what the ultimate use of any technology might be.”
Those ideas are especially relevant now, as some of the biggest tech- nology companies are nearing a major push of a new generation of virtual reality products.
But how people will interact with the imaginary worlds remains largely unknown territory. And that is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is shaping the language companies are using to market the technology.
Perhaps no fictional work resonates more throughout the industry these days than “Ready Player One,” written by Ernest Cline and now being made into a movie by Steven Spielberg.
Much of the action in the book takes place inside the Oasis, a global virtual reality network.
The book was published in 2011, around the time Luckey began building an early prototype of the Oculus headset. Luckey said he appreciated Cline’s portrayals of characters controlling avatars through full-body suits rather than plugging “Matrix”-style cables into their brains.
“None of it is crazy, farout tech,” Luckey said
There is a regular theme in science fiction that its fans in tech talk less about, though: the dystopian aspects of virtual reality. Addiction and disconnection from relationships in the real world are often side effects in narratives about virtual reality.
Entrepreneurs have “an admirable ability to completely ignore the more dystopian elements you’re talking about and see the cool stuff and positive potential of where it might go,” said sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson.
Of course, authors and moviemakers get to overlook other details — like the challenges that real tech companies face.
“You never have to reboot the damned thing” in sci-fi books, said Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel.