Goatload's insane future predictions: Gaming

[Koko Ricky]

Okay, so I kind of have the status here as the local singularity nutjob, but it's really just a fascination with futurism and technology in general. So here's a few predictions about the future of gaming, based on speculation, research and very high thoughts. These scenarios may or may not happen; the ones that do might happen tomorrow or in 1,000 years. Who knows.

• Gaming systems become obsolete as PC, smartphone, Mac, tablet, console and handheld devices converge into multifunctional, singular devices which can serve many purposes.

• Visual fidelity and AI complexity reach a point at which these extremely thin, pocket-sized multifunctional devices can run extremely complex games, far more advanced than today's. Thus, there is no difference between the hardware capabilities of different devices.

• Such devices would be able to stretch to take up most of a wall, shrink to fit in your pocket, or expand/contract to other sizes to suit your needs. This would make gaming completely seamless as you go from one location to another.

• Computers would also be in the form of walls and other surfaces, with biometric scanners that can allow users to access their apps virtually anywhere. This would make gaming possible wherever you go, albeit limited to two dimensions.

• Full immersion gaming would allow for users to see, hear, touch, smell and taste their games. They would also have emotional responses triggered by the realism of the simulation. Such immersion would initially be limited to ultra-thin visors which will replace bulky VR helmets.

• Wireless brain-to-computer interfaces will facilitate full immersion gaming. It will be done without the need to swallow a pill, surgery or visible electrodes.

• Another form of immersive gaming will involve special environments filled with a nano powder--which will work in conjunction with non-evasive brain/computer interfaces--that can change its behavior, color and light properties in order to create 100% convincing gameplay in actual physical space.

• Games existing purely in the mind would take advantage of properties such as the peculiar tendency of DMT to generate hallucinations, resulting in ethereal, highly personal gaming that has the floaty sensation of a dream. Such gaming WOULD have to involve a pill--probably with an MAOI attached to it--or breathable spores ala the PS9 commercial.

• AI databases will be able to generate completely unique games for users based on personality analyzers and keyword inputs.

• AI characters in games will have false memories implanted into them, so they can interact realistically in their environments when spoken to. They will have fluctuations in their tone of voice, be able to laugh at jokes they find funny, even have extensive existential conversations with the player, possibly even on the subject of not being real.

• Graphics will be so detailed (photorealistic for some games) that artifacts such as pixelation, aliasing, geometric angularity, slowdown, uncanny valley, pop-up and other digital anomalies will disappear entirely.

[TMD]

>Implying we are all not just bits of data in "The Sims 7"

[Fletcher`]

TheMionicDonut said:

>Implying we are all not just bits of data in "The Sims 7"

My bits are bigger than your bits.

[BaronOfStuff]

Goatload

...got that right.

[Linkrulezall]

Who's Goatload?

[Obsidian]

Linkrulezall said:

Who's Goatload?

It's what his children will be conceived with.

[geo]

Like the hover car becoming a standard, none of this will happen. It would be beautiful if it did, but it won't.

Wristwatches can already have projections that take up a wall. My friend has a spy watch that she just points it at a wall so she can watch Youtube videos bigger than a wide screen. Its a lot better with the light turned off. Its designed to be taken off the wrist and put down to watch it, but it works easy enough just to wear it and point it. Your arm might get shaky though.

[GreyGhost]

GoatLord said:

• Such devices would be able to stretch to take up most of a wall, shrink to fit in your pocket, or expand/contract to other sizes to suit your needs.

If they can be stretched to different aspect ratios and handle oddities like VGA Mode 13h - I want one now.

[Koko Ricky]

geo said:

Like the hover car becoming a standard, none of this will happen. It would be beautiful if it did, but it won't.

A bit naive, don't you think? Show an iPhone to some dudes in the 70s and they'd think it was alien tech. And surely no one from the 40s would believe we'd have PS4s by the early 21st century. I'm not saying all of these things will happen or that they'll happen tomorrow, but to say NONE of it will happen is extremely silly.

[Kirby]

GoatLord said:

And surely no one from the 40s would believe we'd have PS4s by the early 21st century.

Uhhh, yeah, and The Martian Chronicles had humankind out to populate Mars by 1999. Not everyone believed the same thing or had an accurate timetable of when it would happen.

[Maes]

GoatLord said:

A bit naive, don't you think? Show an iPhone to some dudes in the 70s and they'd think it was alien tech.

Not if you showed it to the researchers at Palo Alto (Xerox) or the US military at the time. The necessary tech to design a functional iPhone was there, but it would not be miniaturizable to that extent with the tech of the time (...or would it, with the US military's resources thrown at it? After all, the US military kept the existence of the 1st microprocessor & DSP secret for 30 years! Only little people think that the Intel 4004 was the "first CPU".).

Essentially, to the eyes of a 1970s computer scientist and electrical engineer, an 2010s iPhone would be like a better computer, benefitting from the incremental improvements of 40 years of R&D, but it would be far from impossible to analyze and understand. It would still use silicon chips, CPUs with registers, and binary logic, just like almost all computers made in the last 70 years do. Even the screen would be understandable (an advanced form of LCD display, and a pressure-sensitive glass plate with a sensor grid).

Now, if you brought something like a holographic emitter or a photonic/neural computer powered on a built-in fusion reactor, something based on a research direction that simply didn't exist or wasn't thought viable/possible back then, that's a different story.

[Koko Ricky]

Good points, but I don't think it changes the fact that the technologies I'm predicting have a non-zero chance of being developed, which is why I thought geo's comment that "none of this will happen" was a bit short-sighted. Nearly everything I mentioned is based on technology being developed right now. Very little of it is coming from pure imagination, if any of it.

[scifista42]

GoatLord said:

• Gaming systems become obsolete as PC, smartphone, Mac, tablet, console and handheld devices converge into multifunctional, singular devices which can serve many purposes.
• Visual fidelity and AI complexity reach a point at which these extremely thin, pocket-sized multifunctional devices can run extremely complex games, far more advanced than today's. Thus, there is no difference between the hardware capabilities of different devices.

Well possible, I'd say.

• Such devices would be able to stretch to take up most of a wall, shrink to fit in your pocket, or expand/contract to other sizes to suit your needs. This would make gaming completely seamless as you go from one location to another.

Hmm, such a device would tend to be too fragile, I think this approach would be obsoleted by other ones, like those other ones you proposed in this thread.

• Computers would also be in the form of walls and other surfaces, with biometric scanners that can allow users to access their apps virtually anywhere. This would make gaming possible wherever you go, albeit limited to two dimensions.

Possible, but the amount of electronics and work connected with their installation might be too high to allow this in near future before all manual work is robotized.

• Graphics will be so detailed (photorealistic for some games) that artifacts such as pixelation, aliasing, geometric angularity, slowdown, uncanny valley, pop-up and other digital anomalies will disappear entirely.
• Full immersion gaming would allow for users to see, hear, touch, smell and taste their games. They would also have emotional responses triggered by the realism of the simulation. Such immersion would initially be limited to ultra-thin visors which will replace bulky VR helmets.
• Wireless brain-to-computer interfaces will facilitate full immersion gaming. It will be done without the need to swallow a pill, surgery or visible electrodes.

I can't imagine how particularly, but I think it would be possible one day. It would be controversial, though, because it borders with manipulating people's perception of reality in a whole new dimension than we have today. Once the virtual reality becomes literally indistinguishable from the true one, it means an extreme danger.

• Another form of immersive gaming will involve special environments filled with a nano powder--which will work in conjunction with non-evasive brain/computer interfaces--that can change its behavior, color and light properties in order to create 100% convincing gameplay in actual physical space.

No. Imagine the energy involved, not to mention expense of production of enough of this nanopowder. Until we have an infinite and extremely powerful energy resource for everybody in the world, forget about the idea that such a thing would be used for an activity like gaming.

• Games existing purely in the mind would take advantage of properties such as the peculiar tendency of DMT to generate hallucinations, resulting in ethereal, highly personal gaming that has the floaty sensation of a dream. Such gaming WOULD have to involve a pill--probably with an MAOI attached to it--or breathable spores ala the PS9 commercial.

LOL! I think this would be obsoleted by "safer" outside gaming systems instead of these "inside" ones. Imagine the risk of program malfunction, or a virus!

• AI databases will be able to generate completely unique games for users based on personality analyzers and keyword inputs.

With advanced-enough AI, this would totally be possible.

• AI characters in games will have false memories implanted into them, so they can interact realistically in their environments when spoken to. They will have fluctuations in their tone of voice, be able to laugh at jokes they find funny, even have extensive existential conversations with the player, possibly even on the subject of not being real.

This is insane and borderline unethical, but with advanced-enough AI, it might become true as a means of simulation.

geo said:

Wristwatches can already have projections that take up a wall. My friend has a spy watch that she just points it at a wall so she can watch Youtube videos bigger than a wide screen. Its a lot better with the light turned off. Its designed to be taken off the wrist and put down to watch it, but it works easy enough just to wear it and point it. Your arm might get shaky though.

Interesting, I'm surprised that this already exists. Surely in the future (possibly even near future), AI will be able to stabilize position of the projection on the wall, even if the projector (wristwatch) shakes as your hand shakes.

[snapshot]

Linkrulezall said:

Who's Goatload?

Never heard of him .

[DoomUK]

GoatLord said:

• AI characters in games will have false memories implanted into them, so they can interact realistically in their environments when spoken to. They will have fluctuations in their tone of voice, be able to laugh at jokes they find funny, even have extensive existential conversations with the player, possibly even on the subject of not being real.

Speaking in more immediate terms, being able to have simple 'conversations' with characters in games is something I definitely see happening in the near future. Think dialogue trees minus the on-screen options, and with thousands of different outcomes.

Having a highbrow intellectual discussion about the meaning of life and shit? One day, maybe. But the baby steps are going to be interesting.

[Maes]

It would be cool to see those things. Some obvious roadblocks now are:

• Non-deterministic, non-procedural AI that can really behave in an organic, fuzzy way, be trainable during gameplay, and not require countless hours of supervised training in a lab to obtain results (anyone having followed at least a NN course or trying to train even a simple NN in MATLAB or other sim tools will know what I'm talking about).
  
• Speech recognition that is at least a hundred times better than today. If games are going to rely more on speech, then multilingualism support will be more of a problem, too. If your interaction is going to be at the level of interacting with the train scheduling automated phone service or a foreign call center, forget about it.
  

Personally, I would like to see a "return to the roots" of videogames, but not like those trying-too-hard attempts to be retro, with beeps and big blocky, uneven size pixels: rather than strive to obtain acceptable framerates from superdetails hi-poly photorealistic worlds, why not aim for games using more abstract, simpler graphics, and captivating gameplay based on ultra-high frame rates (in the hundreds) with super-smooth motion, color gradients and flawless geometric shapes?

Kinda like a Tempest 2000 or Audiosurf on steroids, or even Atari 2600 on steroids.

[j4rio]

GoatLoad is completely off his tits again.

[RUSH]

j4rio said:

GoatLoad is completely off his tits again.

I disagree, I think these are all fairly possible predictions for the future of gaming. Only one I'm struggling with the whole concept of "stretchable" devices. Can't quite wrap my head around the idea of stretching a cloth-like object over my arm and then playing Doom on it. However cool that would be, I couldn't begin to guess how it could ever be possible.

Oh, and "Wireless brain-to-computer interfaces will facilitate full immersion gaming" seems a little "out there" but who knows. If I live long enough to see it that would be quite cool (since it would probably mean science has discovered a way to prolong human life expectancy.) And that would be great.

[Clonehunter]

GoatLoad belongs in all of our asses. Pouring out profusely.

[Kontra Kommando]

I still think holographic projectors are going to replace VR headset. Or Perhaps VR glasses could help supplement the holographic projection in some way.

Goatload is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while.

[Maes]

Kontra Kommando said:

Goatload is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while.

But the competition is fierce at the top!

[Jaxxoon R]

So how many Marios will I have to digest in Goatlords future?

[Koko Ricky]

Keep in mind that not all of these technologies will come to fruition and some will be replaced by others. I'm still on the fence about people swallowing computer pills or breathing in PS9 spores. I feel like the general public might be open to such alien tech after enough time has passed. But not if it were introduced in say, just 10 or 20 years from now.

[Woolie Wool]

DoomUK said:

Speaking in more immediate terms, being able to have simple 'conversations' with characters in games is something I definitely see happening in the near future. Think dialogue trees minus the on-screen options, and with thousands of different outcomes.

Having a highbrow intellectual discussion about the meaning of life and shit? One day, maybe. But the baby steps are going to be interesting.

Who's going to write, implement, debug, and test something that complicated? Video game technology is already running up against the limits of human programmers, artists, and designers to use it, and the limits of even AAA publishers to fund it. If anything I predict games are headed towards a future of less internal complexity for the sake of lowering design costs and man-hour requirements. What you're describing is a nightmare to implement even for a company with EA's pockets.

Also the "nanopowder" sounds like a great way to get silicosis or other nasty lung conditions. You do not want millions of tiny debris particles in your lungs.

[DoomUK]

I could use the old "we might not have thought [insert tech] was possible but it happened anyway" argument, but you're probably just going to tell me that it's different this time. :p

[Maes]

The single largest foreseeable obstacles for any future technologies (at this point), are the limits of silicon-based electronics (miniaturization can only drop to so many nm, frequency can only rise so much etc., power density can only be that high etc.), the inherent limits of the Turing & Von Neumann computer architectures that have been used since the 1940s, and the limits of portable power sources (for mobile/wearable devices).

Since a decade, we've already entered a phase where any and all enhancements are purely additive and multiplicative (e.g. more cores, more cache, more data bus width, more GPUs), but the fundamental design architectures have remained the same, and underneath everything is the same old dumb mechanical approach, repeated over and over (and better?).

There'd have to be major breakthroughs such as a completely new branch of electronics, some revolutionary conception of computability (e.g. a viable asynchronous "clockless" CPU or the ability to do Lambda calculus in hardware, without a Von Neumann intermediary), adoption in consumer electronics of "exotic" materials such as Gallium, use of microwave circuit design principles, photonic computers, a reintroduction of analog computational units (the fastest electronic circuit in the world is analog! 1THz) and vacuum microelectonics, hardware implementations of neural networks that wouldn't require a conventional software layer etc.

As for portable devices, something that far exceeds not only modern batteries, but also the energy density of most liquid fuels would have to be devised, like e.g. practical miniaturized fuel cells, safe thermonuclear pocket-size generators etc.

[hardcore_gamer]

GoatLord said:

• Gaming systems become obsolete as PC, smartphone, Mac, tablet, console and handheld devices converge into multifunctional, singular devices which can serve many purposes.

I disagree. I don't want a everything in one style gadget. Such a machine would probably just be too expensive and only do a mediocre job at each of the things it's suppose to do compared to a specialized machine.

[Kontra Kommando]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/234752/New_holographic_goggles_from_Microsoft_have_video_game_potential.php

http://www.vcpost.com/articles/54737/20150403/microsoft-hololens-release-windows-10-late-year-awesome-wireless-headset.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/11358502/Windows-10-what-you-need-to-know.html

Apparently, what I suggested is already becoming a reality.

Imagine playing doom inside of your house, where your house is actually the level? You'd probably need an all purpose light-gun. Maybe even a vest with pin-point vibration to simulate the impact of taking damage. Maybe at this point you'd actually see kids getting exercise, and playing outside. You could meet up with a bunch of people at a park, and have a death-match.

[hardcore_gamer]

Imagine playing doom inside of your house, where your house is actually the level? [/B]

It would be a dumb gimmick that would get old fast.

[Krispy]

I never read the first post (*really*) because I already know that it involves shoving technology into Goatlord's body and probably ties into asexualism.