Business And Futurology

[Mactyville]

Since more People are joining at nervegearsquad and its clearly shown that nervegearsquad is more popular i would say that nervegearsquad is the choice so im going to take forum.brosquad.de offline but i would like to help the guys of nervegearsquad, if you want you can send me a pm.

Yes, everyone is welcome to that site. But let's not forget that this is not about the competition anymore. It's about our sole reason now. Why are we here? Why are we researching like crazy? It's because we wanted to achieve the realization of VR. ^^

[DHendry1988]

Exactly :)

But once again, we gotta get our heads around the brain first. Without a logical layout of the brain and how to interface with it in a non-intrusive fashion, we're leaving this all to conflicted guesswork. So I say, all y'all that know about brains, collaborate quick-like so as to give us a head start (pun kinda intended) ;)

[Kilravok]

That is kinda what the other site is made for, to collate everything we have so far and learn/find in future into a structured system.  We need to get some order into our thoughts and information.  We can still stay in this forum for idea bouncing to keep this thread active and enable others to fin us, as far as I know, the other forum is open registration, anybody can sign up and join, you don't need to register to read and it has everything google needs to find it.

 

We don't need to worry about funding until we have collected all the information we can find for free (which should be a lot, with all the students in the relevant sciences here).  Fudning b ecomes expensive when we have to start paying for already discovered knowledge and need to start getting equipemtn and licences to conduct our own research.  That is however still at least half a year away (unless if we continue in this disorderly fashion, then it would take another 10 years before we have any kind of usable library of information put together).

 

On the other forum, we have set up categories for the different fields and can always add more.  We can catalogise all links and information, put easy to find topics to discussions and improve our productivity by letting people read posts on the subjects they are interested in or work with, without having to sift through a swamp of unrelated posts.  Keep this thread here, as many times repeated already, for the idea bouncing.  Would be great if we had someone here who is into library science and enjoys sorting and transcribing stuff to collect the posts here and copy them into the correct order and categories on the other forum.

[DHendry1988]

Lol @ Zazz :D

 

I think the best analogy for the new site idea is as follows.

 

You have your bedroom, it's a total mess. No room for anything, no space to do anything. You buy out, or rent out, another room in the house and use that to organize all your stuff. Once you've moved out everything you can, you may be more organized but you'll still have too much. And now you're left with another room that is in practically no use but for storing new things you bought until you can find a space for it in your new room.

How about just being tidier and sorting everything out into a more appealing display than just moving out? Be the responsible teenager your parents wanted you to be :)

[zazz54]

Hey everyone, my name is Chad. I have been following this forum very closely, and am beyond excited with the direction that it is going. Seeing SAO and the virtual world come to life is my dream, and I'll do everything I can to help out. I'm 17 and will being graduating high school soon. Though I am not currently an expert on any of various topics that will come into play, I plan to attend collage for the specific purpose of learning how I can help. I'm extremely encouraged by the excitement and dedication I've seen from others my age. Due to the nature of this project, and it's long timeframe, I see us playing a huge role in the future. I've been looking at majoring in computer engineering, with a minor in neuroscience. If anyone can think of a more useful coarse of education, I am open to suggestions! Please email me with anything you may need help with, or with any advice at [email protected].

Thanks everyone, I look forward to working with you all in the future!

The editor in me would suggest first that you take more care in how you write. When you enter college, you might make a collage of pictures you've taken, which in turn may give you ideas on the course you follow, provided your pictures are not too coarse. Just an idea.

[zazz54]

Sorry for my long absense, I was without ionternet a few days.  Also sorry for not replying to earlier posts that I missed and instead going straight to what seems to be the present main topic, along with what I can remember from earlier posts after ariving at the end of the thread....

 

The Waldo could be used by developers as tuning platform for motoric translations, at best.  It only gives a True3D but lacks the immersiveness of VR.  In any VR system, be is from SAO or AccelWorld or GitS, there is a full sensoric isolation from the physical world when you dive.  You can not hear when somebody talks to you while online.  With the DDW, you still can hear what people say, you feel the drop in physical room temperature, you feel your own real hunger, etc.... With a FDVR system, you don't have any of that, you would need peripheral comunication tools for someone outside the VR environment to talk to someone on the inside.

 

As for the simulated hunger and eating, if the NerveGear is limited to the already listed sensoric centres and limited to reading skeleton muscle instructions, then the NG would not even know when or if you are hungry and would not be able to simulate being hundry or sated...with no access to the part of the brain that reads your blood sugar or other parts of blood chemestry, there is no way it can do that, just as it could not manipulate your adrenalin or dopenin or serotonin levels.  Those would be regulated by the brain naturally based on context of sensoric input (The supernatural terror efect of undead or lust/affection efect of succubi won't be able to affect player characters in VR).  The taste/scent input is purely for immersion, but eating food might still have game mechanical relevance (keeping HP or speed up, etc...).

 

Security is easy if it is a brain scanning NG style system...If I understand correctly, each person has a unique composition of brainwave patterns.  Those alone would work out as identifier to check that you are you.  If brainwave identification can not be done, the helmet's visor might quire realistically have a retina scanner included.  To prevent unallowed access to your accounts, the account information is on the helmet, inputted on initial start-up via virtual interface and scan, it is inputted ONCE, IF the helmet sees that there is no account already set up.  The information is saved on a chip that can be written on ONCE, after it is written on, the BIOS will erase the code required to write into that ID chip.  The new helmet can be set up to a new owner, once an owner is set up, it is set up for life.  The helmet reads the user ID only on startup for ID confirmation.  Anti-hacking and virus protection is achieved through using a system-exclusive OS, maybe even exclusive language, and file format.  Only licenced game developers will have the code, limiting the possible places a virus might get into the system and making it perfectly trackable.

 

Making money with this is not a crime, we can even allow ourselves to get filthy rich with it.  At the very least, we should try to recoup the R&D costs.  Cutting corners and slacking off on safety and quality for the sake of maximised profit however is a deadly sin.  Anybody trying that will be sent to the resurection altar a thousend times and then sued into kingdom come.

As long as we keep a tight check on where we get our funding from, try to get loans rather than selling shares and refuse to ever have the company itself sellable, neither Google nor FaceAche should be able to get their fingers in the gears.  They can research their own methods and codes or wait until the time for our IP and patent protection runs out.

 

 

I hope I responded to everything that came in since.  If not, please accept my appoligies and remind me....and please forgive my abysmal spelling...

Firstly, your spelling was not abysmal. A plus in my books. I am wondering about how such an immersive VR game could be shared with, "multiple players," or is the intent of this project to create only an individually-played system?

[Daynjr]

Exactly :)

But once again, we gotta get our heads around the brain first. Without a logical layout of the brain and how to interface with it in a non-intrusive fashion, we're leaving this all to conflicted guesswork. So I say, all y'all that know about brains, collaborate quick-like so as to give us a head start (pun kinda intended) ;)

 

I love puns, Good work Dhendry1988 :D

 

It seems like you are leaning towards the less technical aspects of the "NerveGear" I am working on some research on the ethics side of this. I'd love some input once i can get everything and my thoughts together. I also understand your analogy for The "tidy room" scenario but I'd like to think it's a bit different from that. 

 

This first forum is similar to when you come home and you have a bunch of groceries in your arms and you are just trying to get them all in the house. This forum is the kitchen counter and the ideas/information are the groceries. Our second  website would be something to the effect of placing all those groceries in their proper place. Bread in the bread box, milk in the refrigerator, cookies in the pantry, so on and so forth. I feel like the ideas are getting properly categorized there and that way if we need to refer to something quickly we can pick it up and use that for any additional research, or when we just really want some milk and cookies. :D

 

but whenever we go shopping or just want to have a quick bite in the kitchen, this forum will be the place for it. 

hope my analogy is understood. 

[Mactyville]

That is kinda what the other site is made for, to collate everything we have so far and learn/find in future into a structured system.  We need to get some order into our thoughts and information.  We can still stay in this forum for idea bouncing to keep this thread active and enable others to fin us, as far as I know, the other forum is open registration, anybody can sign up and join, you don't need to register to read and it has everything google needs to find it.

 

We don't need to worry about funding until we have collected all the information we can find for free (which should be a lot, with all the students in the relevant sciences here).  Fudning b ecomes expensive when we have to start paying for already discovered knowledge and need to start getting equipemtn and licences to conduct our own research.  That is however still at least half a year away (unless if we continue in this disorderly fashion, then it would take another 10 years before we have any kind of usable library of information put together).

 

On the other forum, we have set up categories for the different fields and can always add more.  We can catalogise all links and information, put easy to find topics to discussions and improve our productivity by letting people read posts on the subjects they are interested in or work with, without having to sift through a swamp of unrelated posts.  Keep this thread here, as many times repeated already, for the idea bouncing.  Would be great if we had someone here who is into library science and enjoys sorting and transcribing stuff to collect the posts here and copy them into the correct order and categories on the other forum.

Then I suggest we create a team that will compile all the ideas to its respective topic on the other site while others would continue brainstorming and doing other stuffs..

 

Oh, and by the way..I just want to remind you guys that we should focus first on the VR machine that we are working. 'cause I think some of us here is now focusing on the game.. Keep in mind that the game is just like a mere cd rom where all the game data is stored to be plugged in a computer and be processed by the VR machine.. I think we should set aside first the thoughts of multiplayer and single player system..let's focus first on the development and progress of the concept of VR.. ^^ :) Am I making sense to you guys? :)

[Kilravok]

Nothing wrong with being a little paranoid, and just because you are, does not mean they are not after you.  But as I see it, the amount of control and detail in the scans and manipulations required can not be achieved with non-intrusive methods, which would be almost exclusively EM based in one form or another.

 

It is true, the original sentiment of having a seperate exclusive forum was IP protection and secrecy, but we are still far from the point where such would even make sense.  The seperate forum has the benefit that we can actually put the results of the brainstorming into some kind of order and make sense of it all.  Just a single thread string of brain storming will very fast become a swamp of useless random.

 

 

As to focussing on the machine rather than the possible softwares, I haven't yet seen many posts that mentioned possible softwares, only what kind of aspects the NerveGear in SAO was able to bring into the game environments; like having full body control and potentially use of actual manual skill (if present and if muscle memory can be accessed) but still having skill mechanics, as in traditional MMO (in the anime called System Assisted Skills).

 

Yes, we need to focus first and foremost on the neuro science and creating the interface technology, before we can worry too much about what the interface unit will look like or what kind of games we can play with it or other non-entertainment uses it might have.  First we know how to interface a computer with neural impulses and make the computer understand and interpret those impulses correctly.  After the computer can translate neural impulses into digital computer signals, we need to find out how the computer can translate digital computer signals correctly into neural impulses.  Only after that is achieved, we can worry about what parts, other than sensoric and motor functions, we want to address....my own vote, keep it limited to those, except maybe give the computer access to muscle memory...

 

Once all those things are establed, we can start thinking about the fancy stuff, like applications, games and designs.  However, since not everybody here is a scientist, those whom's talents lie in socials or creativity can already start looking at the lower priority subjects.  Rather than saying, one thing is not needed, others are more important, let's just each of us work to our strengths. 

I know there are many here who are into neurology or computer sciences, some even are still in the process of moving into those fields and motivated, apparently, mainly by the SAO anime.  That is not too bad, many people who can work on the actual technology, they can focus there. 

There are also some who are more skilled in the field of software engineering and application design.  There is nothing wrong with them already giving some thought to how the virtual user-interface would work and look like and what kind of applications, utilities and games are possible. 

There are, however, at least three people who have no scientific mind at all and would rather focus on the ethical and social aspects of the project.  It would be unfair to exclude them from the discussions, much better to give them a place to already talk about it without causing confusion or clutter in the technical discussions.

Furthermore, it would be quite beneficial to have library science and research assistance present whom's strongpoint it is to scour the interweb for information, research reports and news related to the project and collate them along with the chaotic mess of this brainstorm into a systemised order that actually is useful to anybody (or at least somebody) and can be worked with.

[EdwinETTang]

Phew! That took quite some time to read (this thread and the one over at the other site). Have been busy with school. It's pleasant to see a huge increase in the number of people replying to this thread, but after reading what I've missed out (ever since I last posted), I feel that there are some things to take note of.

 

Firstly, I think that other than discussing the software (though there isn't much currently) that will be used for the VR machine. I think that there should be another discussion on how the machine will be tested out when a prototype is made (a program will need to be made that suits the machine and its software.). It's good to have ideas for the hardware but I feel that discussion on the means of testing out the machine should run concurrently with the hardware used so that everything is pretty much consistent. Imagine if we finally build a prototype but we do not know how we could test its input and output efficiency, it's gonna be like starting from scratch all over again.

 

Secondly, I feel that the viewpoint on the VR problem has been changed quite significantly. It's hard to put it into words but to put it in it's simplest form, I would say that there are 2-3 generations/different stands on the same issue currently. I'm not sure if this is worth mentioning but if you read the entire thread from the beginning, I believe that some feasible ideas has already been discussed previously and I think that they are worth considering and more things should come to light from what we know know and what has been talked about.

 

Third (I feel like I'm writing an essay...), here's a general (and I mean very general) list of things that we need to be concerned about currently, 1. The hardware. 2. The software 3. Ways of testing it out. I suppose the lack of people is the issue for this but I think we might be focusing too much on the hardware of the VR machine.

 

Speaking about the hardware, I have a suggestion. We could have 2 sub teams for this group. 1 group will focus on creating a prototype with existing technology, and the other will be a research team on being able to create a Full Dive Virtual Reality device. But here's another problem, all we have are ideas so we'll need a team to meet up and start prototyping and carry out experiments for a device (I suppose money is another issue here). 

 

Anyway, I'm just restating some of the points that has been made earlier in the thread but I think that we may be losing track of some of the focus here.

 

Welps, I'm hoping to be able to enter Digipen to join its course in Real-time Interactive Simulation~ Oh and nice to meet you. TanglingTreats here~

 

*Edit: @Kbijon. That video you shared was really cool. It's vaguely related to one of my replies about gaming/VR mechanics but that wouldn't work if LeapMotion doesn't detect the hand~

Edited January 27, 2015 by TanglingTreats

[CraigD]

But CraigD, since most (if not all) of my direction comes from you, and Shodan, I would like to know where to begin

Where to begin – that is, what, personally, someone committed to the goal of making an very immersive, “full dive” virtual reality system like the one depicted in Sword Art Online, should do next – depends critically on what such a system should actually be. This requires some guesses about the future of consumer technology. It’s hard to make such guessed with much confidence – the best experts in this field, a specialty of futurology, have historically failed spectacularly, with hardly any predictions about more than 10 years in the future being very accurate.

 

If you conclude that full dive technology will require a true brain–computer interface, and want to be deeply involved in such efforts, I’d say the best next move anyone under about 50 years old could make would be, if they don’t have one already, attending medical school and getting an MD, specializing in neurology, with the intention not of then beginning a clinical medical practice, but of entering a PhD program in computer engineering, though many brain-computer interface researchers have only a single degree, some sub-doctoral.

 

For more specific guidance, and general good advice and encouragement, I’ve found it’s helpful to correspond with people in the field, such as people listed at team members lists like this one for Braingate. Not all, but in my experience most, researchers are glad to give people just starting in a field advice and encouragement.

 

If you conclude that full dive technology can be better achieved without a true brain-computer interface, you should avoid spending much of your working life learning MD/PhD level medicine and neurology, and focus almost entirely on hardware and software. Computer engineering programs, undergraduate through PhD, are ideal for this, and available at most larger universities.

 

The advice I’ve sketched here isn’t much different than the sound advice of academics for the past few centuries – work hard and do well in school, seek out people doing well at what you want to be doing, and ask them for guidance.

 

On a different, administrative, subject, as a several people have observed, this thread had grown long and disorderly, chronologically ordered mish-mash on different sub-subjects of a main theme that’s so long it’s difficult for a new visitor to read, and hard even for long-time readers and posters to review. I propose creating breaking it up into shorter threads by subject, something like this:

• Making a NerveGear-type device
• Alternatives to NerveGear-type devices
• Non-interface virtual reality programming
• Business and Futurology

I propose creating a new sub-forum under Science Forums → General Science Forums → Computer Science and Technology, “FullDive technology (the science of Sword Art Online)”, and keeping these and any other threads people would like to start on the subject in it.

 

Please, everyone, feel free to suggest changes or additions to the above. If there are no objection, I’ll plan to do this Sunday, February 1.

[Kilravok]

CraigD, We already have a forum set up broken down into specialised categories at nervegearsquad.clanwebsite.com.  Please have a look around there and let us know if we need to alter the structure.  Of course, you are also welcome to join the discussions there.

[Hale]

Hello everyone, I created an account just to follow this thread and submit my own ideas. All of you seem like a great group of people, and I want to help. Currently I am a little to hyped/ tired (2:00 AM were I am) to really give my feedback on the whole brain issue. I just wanted to offer my services as a graphic designer. I can give concept art, an icon if all of you are really serious about this. (also I'm only on page seven of this form, so I apologize if anything has already been said.) I want to be some help. I am only 16, but I'm studying the brain and our nervous systems so maybe some time latter I can contribute. I really look forward to all of the amazing things we can do. Also my email is [email protected] if you want to contact me. I can't wait for the future!! :)

[ogprince]

Moderation note: this post and 32 posts that follow it were moved from How Long Until We Could Make A Real Sword Art Online (sao) Nerve Gear Type Device because they discuss business and teambuilding rather than the original thread’s topic.

 

 

This is just amazing how much this conversation grown. I have been reading this and researching ever since november and i feel this is possible in next 10-15 year due to the amount of research like i really want to see this go through to the end and i want to be part of this. So i create this account to help with our cause and lets make this dream we have a reality.

[CaelesMessorem]

ogprince:

Agreed! This topic has almost 100k views. That's impressive. Not only that, but it means there's more interest in this technology than just those participating in this thread. The more interest, the more advancements we could potnetially see in this field of research!

 

cburruss:

Can you elaborate a tad more? :)

[ogprince]

Once we become big and actrully start going to work on this project this can changed the way people live their lives like VR can be a second life and what should we call thjs project???

[webman128]

Once we become big and actrully start going to work on this project this can changed the way people live their lives like VR can be a second life and what should we call thjs project???

Anyone correct me if I'm wrong but this isn't a forum for development. We're not actually creating this as a team. This is a forum where people share possible ideas that could potentially be beneficial the development of such VR technology. It could be thought of as a think tank where we brainstorm ideas that could be researched in the future. For example CraigD's inconspicuous invasive electrode approach; if such technology were to be developed, research could be conducted to test its effectiveness in this goal. That's my take on this.