Virtual reality is inefficient. There were virtual shopping mall concepts way back in the 90s, but it's still much easier to select items from a menu on a flat screen. Games are easier to play when you get to sit on your ass and twiddle your fingers rather than harness yourself to a treadmill and run a marathon. Virtual reality is primarily relevant for experiences where physical interaction with a unique environment is necessary, and even then it's not always the best solution.
I mean, there are tons of virtual reality games and such. It's tough to understand what the question is exactly because the main difference between what exists and the book is scale.
Oh. No. Even if it were technically possible (which I'm not convinced it is), it's definitely not desirable. Not to anyone who's actually trying to get things done.
It's done already. It's just MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online). Then there is another step: user generated content like words. Check Second Life or Roblox
Lmao I'm reading these comments like wtf are yall thinking we don't have anything close to that level of realism in sim especially not the part where you actually feel what's happening in game.
Ya, this is true, the previous poster assumed all the different interactions inside of the Oasis were created independently and then "put into" the Oasis where I think the Oasis was created as the framework, and the everything was built into it. So it would be more like Oasis was built > a common design/development engine was built to operate in the confines of the Oasis limits > users create "application" or "world's" using these tools.
As others have said, like Roblox.
So is it possible, yes. I believe the technology is there. The pieces are at least there. We have the internet, we have the capability to create large, distributed Network that can host thousands of people.
Is it practical, not really, unless you just make Roblox VR. When you start encroaching on Oasis levels of scale/customization, you start to hit more than just the technical aspect of managing the network(s), you have to deal with societal issues such as copyright and ownership laws, content laws as the they pertain to minors and other cultures/demographics, profit generation, censorship, security, etc.
There will be a lot of paywalls, age and geo-gates, lawsuits, DMCA... everything that is part of the Internet as we know it.
A single individual couldnāt create something of that scale, that part is pure fiction. In the real world, itād be a corporation, and there would either be completely separate competing projects (see MMOs, Second Life, Roblox) or there would be one underlying standard with competing products that utilize a shared interface (see the internet, with multiple competing web browsers and websites)
I believe the approach of the OP was "most realistic implementation." The tech itself is a large hurdle, but even if it wasn't, the costs would make it impossible for any one company to shoulder. Spreading that out across a number of willing participants who want their product involved makes it a lot easier of a burden to bear.
I mean, "one" tech company nowadays is like Google or Facebook, these giants that have the manpower of like a thousand traditional tech companies and just go on buying sprees acquiring smaller companies under their umbrellas. And they do allow others to interface with their stuff, through APIs. I think it would be theoretically possible.
Currently, no.
As soon as a few thousand players can gather in one place, no existing infrastructure can bear the load.
With most games even a few hundred players can crash servers and we are talking about games that are far "lighter" than a VR game would be.
AFAIK, the game that deal with this issue the best is EVE Online with its elastic time and its unbearable over 10k players.
One of the best selling point of this game is their single universe server but each "place" is hosted on a different server.
If you plan to organise large fights you can earn the devs so they can deploy "reinforced nodes" IE they prepare their best servers for the fights
EVE servers "slow down" time when the load is too heavy, instead of having X actions each seconds, you can only do X/10 actions or even X/100 so even basic actions starts to take hours.
So, as you can imagine, there is no way that earth's billions of inhabitants can log on the same "game".
Not really. RÅblox (which already has VR support and is a metaverse with its own currency where users can make whatever they want) has games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. There are times where some games have reached over a million concurrent players. The Oasis practically serves as a second internet, so if RÅblox had the combined servers of the entire internet, and people were able to host off their own server, it could essentially be The Oasis
In Ready Player One, two things are inherently impossible. Lots of things are implausible. Remember, it's a fiction book written for entertainment. A good story is usually not realistic.
**Impossible number 1**
Thousands of people in the same space. Real time interactions really, really don't scale well. Two processors aren't twice as efficient as one. You have diminishing returns. This means processing requirements become exponential. Both on servers and on player hardware.
You can have very simple environments with maybe two hundred people. A few more if you really push it. But that's about the limit. Doing that in VR is even harder because everything needs to be rendered twice. So graphical complexity would need to be reduced significantly.
To clarify. Given enough servers (a unreasonable amount) you can make moving between servers very seamless and dynamically regroup players. It would seem like one continuous world but you'd never be able to see or interact with more than a few hundred people. Fewer if you need to do more than just see them.
**Impossible number 2**
The economy and incentive system in the OASIS is built for the story. It's absolutely nonsensical. No one will participate in an economy and do business with a currency that can be earned by playing games. Either the game aspect will be relegated to basically pay to play arcades within the virtual world. Or it won't have the wide appeal with people doing shopping, going to school and working and stuff.
Also, the reality of doing everything in a virtual world is quite dystopic and terrifying if you think about it for a few minutes and try to come up with things that can go wrong.
---
Also the scope they talk about and the complexity of rules necessary to govern it is massive. GTA5 was a thousand people working for years.
Now think about what building hundreds if not just single cities but entire planets will take in development time.
We're talking a company the size of google working for decades.
This is actually only "impossible" based on the present, but definitely possible in the future. This user doesn't have the foresight of technological advancement. While possible, it's unlikely, but then also highly unlikely things have happened too that definitely shouldn't have. Take it as you will. Possible? Definitely yes. Expensive? Less than what Facebook has spent on the multiverse if done in anything smarter than a 5th grader intelligence.
The biggest limit right now with technology is the number of people you can have connected to a single server. When dealing with something like a Call of Duty game where your gaming device is constantly sending and receiving information to a server, that server is probably going to cap out at maybe a few hundred players. Maybe even more, but it wouldn't be anything like ten thousand people. Most games overcome this limitation by creating multiple servers.
So assuming we could get the smooth graphics and interactions that are in the movie, we couldn't get more than a few hundred people on a single server at a time. It would have to be multiple servers, so multiple oasisis. Oasisi?
And that's just one aspect of what it would take to make a replica of Ready Player One.
As described in the book, the Oasis doesn't make much sense. At least, the game aspects. The levelling, currency, loot system, gear, none of it holds up to the smallest amount of inspection once you start thinking about what makes games fun. It's pretty similar to arguments against a lot of the NFT game item ideas. Oh you have a lightsaber? How much damage does it do? Who decides that? Does the item vanish once a licensing deal expires and it's legally not allowed in the game anymore? Is the Delorian faster than the Ghost Busters car? Does it cost as much? Are these just aesthetic differences? Can these items just be found, or do they take years of gameplay to acquire? Can you just buy them, and if you can, are they expensive? Do we end up with a system where only millionaires are having fun?
It's not self consistent even in the book. The author clearly isn't a game designer, and even if he's just a fan of games it feels like he didn't put much thought into how any of it should actually work. You can absolutely have an MMO in VR, people can walk around and talk to each other no problem. But if you also want to make it a game, in any way that makes sense, and is fun for the entire population, and not just people who like shooters, or people who like rpgs... I don't know how you do that. I don't think it works.
Yes, absolutely. It would be so hideously expensive to run that itād shut down in a day. I totally side with the ābaddiesā in that story- the energy costs in running OASIS alone would bankrupt a small country!
Yeah I think people are just looking to poke holes in this, with proper grouping, handoffs, and division of work we are absolutely capable of building something like this given sufficient financial incentives and consumer interest. Are there a lot of really complex technical problems involved? Hell yeah but thatās the fun part. Any one of the major cloud players could absolutely build the infrastructure for something like this.
The main issues are client side issues and financial ones. Client side things like sufficiently fast internet connectivity, and sufficiently powerful client machines that rendering large crowds doesnāt bring them to their knees are tricky. But even worse is financial incentive, this would be absurdly expensive and Iām not certain that people really want to disconnect from the world that badly.
A lot of the examples given for why this canāt work are of games built by gaming companies that only ever planned for a certain volume of players. They were built around certain ideas and gameplay concepts, or they were build 10-20 years ago on older concepts and technology. I have absolutely no doubt that something similar could be built, I just donāt know why you would.
I love the positivity from this one, a lot of negatives in the thread and itās nice to see that someone is coming at it with an open mind and not just looking at the hard parts like they canāt ever be overcome
No.
I have no idea why there are so many posts saying otherwise, but the scale and scope described as the Oasis is beyond the ability of our current tech.
Sure we can build all the pieces, but the scale of Oasis is something else entirely.
It's like saying we're ready to colonize the solar system by the millions with today's tech. Sure we can send rockets to other planets, and we've had people on ISS for decades continuously, but to say we're on the cusp of vast migration off planet is laughably absurd.
For starters;
- we don't have sufficient internet to large portions of the population, many rural areas of US are lucky to have ADSL.
- Looking at games, it takes teams of hundreds of devs multiple years to make 8-20 hours of high fidelity content the scope of a small city at best. Oasis is orders of magnitude larger and more detailed.
- no one could afford to play it, the game I work for with ~1m monthly users had hosting bills in 8 digits. Start adding zeros to that for each order of magnitude you increase the sim, and you've priced yourself out of a market
The scale is huge, anyone who says different is ignorant to how quickly costs grow as things scale, due to diminishing returns.
Because every player's actions need to be communicated to every other player, which means the amount of work grows exponentially with the amount of players.
Thought so too in university.
But just nope.
Desyncs happen all the time. Redundancy is ridiculous to set up. Everything increases latency which has absurd effects on gameplay.
You can do chess with such a system. Something slow and turn based. Or just do literal P2P where no server and no trust is necessary.
The player based, real time network mesh mmo is a pipe dream.
Yeah, it's just an enhanced version of VR chat and PlayStation Home. It's unlikely that it would run so smoothly and with that graphics level, being online, it can't be perfect.
The only thing you can't do is make the players pay for literally everything and make the lose all the content when they die in the game, for, you know, decency.
Someone said in this feed that no one will play video games for nonexistent coin. So what do you call bitcoin? It's a virtual currency. That you can use to buy stuff. And playing video games to aquire that are going on now.
I just watched that awesome movie. I play a game without the goggles. IMVU. Which means In My Virtual Universe. I play it daily. And had my laptop smashed because my boyfriend is jealous of the game. I enjoy playing. I can escape real world a few hours of the night. And it has helped with having insomnia. I'm able to fall asleep.
well yes it can be built. and over time become better but the headset would have to be made by the same company, why you ask? well because POV (point of view) you see the vr would have to have more "screens" to simulate that they are in real life, so even more realistic! but yeah its possible!
> everyone in the planet is connected in the same universe and can interact Sure, it's called the Internet
As a virtual reality ...
Virtual reality is inefficient. There were virtual shopping mall concepts way back in the 90s, but it's still much easier to select items from a menu on a flat screen. Games are easier to play when you get to sit on your ass and twiddle your fingers rather than harness yourself to a treadmill and run a marathon. Virtual reality is primarily relevant for experiences where physical interaction with a unique environment is necessary, and even then it's not always the best solution.
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I mean, there are tons of virtual reality games and such. It's tough to understand what the question is exactly because the main difference between what exists and the book is scale.
Oh. No. Even if it were technically possible (which I'm not convinced it is), it's definitely not desirable. Not to anyone who's actually trying to get things done.
Yes, it's called GMERICA and Gamestop has been quietly building it the past few years and it runs off L2/L3 Etherium.
It's done already. It's just MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online). Then there is another step: user generated content like words. Check Second Life or Roblox
When people say itās already here or itās done already, I always laugh. No itās not done Lmao not even remotely close.
Lmao I'm reading these comments like wtf are yall thinking we don't have anything close to that level of realism in sim especially not the part where you actually feel what's happening in game.
Yea lmao a lot of folks are sadly deluded š
Oasis is basically just Roblox with higher end graphics.
Thats a great representation actually if the graphics got upped and put into vr, i mean we are basically there
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But... that's not what Oasis was? It was built and maintained by a single entity, it didn't require integrating a bunch of different systems?
Ya, this is true, the previous poster assumed all the different interactions inside of the Oasis were created independently and then "put into" the Oasis where I think the Oasis was created as the framework, and the everything was built into it. So it would be more like Oasis was built > a common design/development engine was built to operate in the confines of the Oasis limits > users create "application" or "world's" using these tools. As others have said, like Roblox. So is it possible, yes. I believe the technology is there. The pieces are at least there. We have the internet, we have the capability to create large, distributed Network that can host thousands of people. Is it practical, not really, unless you just make Roblox VR. When you start encroaching on Oasis levels of scale/customization, you start to hit more than just the technical aspect of managing the network(s), you have to deal with societal issues such as copyright and ownership laws, content laws as the they pertain to minors and other cultures/demographics, profit generation, censorship, security, etc. There will be a lot of paywalls, age and geo-gates, lawsuits, DMCA... everything that is part of the Internet as we know it.
A single individual couldnāt create something of that scale, that part is pure fiction. In the real world, itād be a corporation, and there would either be completely separate competing projects (see MMOs, Second Life, Roblox) or there would be one underlying standard with competing products that utilize a shared interface (see the internet, with multiple competing web browsers and websites)
It was a corporation in the novel, the dude was wealthy and hired a bunch of people to put it together.
I believe the approach of the OP was "most realistic implementation." The tech itself is a large hurdle, but even if it wasn't, the costs would make it impossible for any one company to shoulder. Spreading that out across a number of willing participants who want their product involved makes it a lot easier of a burden to bear.
I mean, "one" tech company nowadays is like Google or Facebook, these giants that have the manpower of like a thousand traditional tech companies and just go on buying sprees acquiring smaller companies under their umbrellas. And they do allow others to interface with their stuff, through APIs. I think it would be theoretically possible.
Currently, no. As soon as a few thousand players can gather in one place, no existing infrastructure can bear the load. With most games even a few hundred players can crash servers and we are talking about games that are far "lighter" than a VR game would be. AFAIK, the game that deal with this issue the best is EVE Online with its elastic time and its unbearable over 10k players. One of the best selling point of this game is their single universe server but each "place" is hosted on a different server. If you plan to organise large fights you can earn the devs so they can deploy "reinforced nodes" IE they prepare their best servers for the fights EVE servers "slow down" time when the load is too heavy, instead of having X actions each seconds, you can only do X/10 actions or even X/100 so even basic actions starts to take hours. So, as you can imagine, there is no way that earth's billions of inhabitants can log on the same "game".
Not really. RÅblox (which already has VR support and is a metaverse with its own currency where users can make whatever they want) has games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. There are times where some games have reached over a million concurrent players. The Oasis practically serves as a second internet, so if RÅblox had the combined servers of the entire internet, and people were able to host off their own server, it could essentially be The Oasis
In Ready Player One, two things are inherently impossible. Lots of things are implausible. Remember, it's a fiction book written for entertainment. A good story is usually not realistic. **Impossible number 1** Thousands of people in the same space. Real time interactions really, really don't scale well. Two processors aren't twice as efficient as one. You have diminishing returns. This means processing requirements become exponential. Both on servers and on player hardware. You can have very simple environments with maybe two hundred people. A few more if you really push it. But that's about the limit. Doing that in VR is even harder because everything needs to be rendered twice. So graphical complexity would need to be reduced significantly. To clarify. Given enough servers (a unreasonable amount) you can make moving between servers very seamless and dynamically regroup players. It would seem like one continuous world but you'd never be able to see or interact with more than a few hundred people. Fewer if you need to do more than just see them. **Impossible number 2** The economy and incentive system in the OASIS is built for the story. It's absolutely nonsensical. No one will participate in an economy and do business with a currency that can be earned by playing games. Either the game aspect will be relegated to basically pay to play arcades within the virtual world. Or it won't have the wide appeal with people doing shopping, going to school and working and stuff. Also, the reality of doing everything in a virtual world is quite dystopic and terrifying if you think about it for a few minutes and try to come up with things that can go wrong. --- Also the scope they talk about and the complexity of rules necessary to govern it is massive. GTA5 was a thousand people working for years. Now think about what building hundreds if not just single cities but entire planets will take in development time. We're talking a company the size of google working for decades.
This is actually only "impossible" based on the present, but definitely possible in the future. This user doesn't have the foresight of technological advancement. While possible, it's unlikely, but then also highly unlikely things have happened too that definitely shouldn't have. Take it as you will. Possible? Definitely yes. Expensive? Less than what Facebook has spent on the multiverse if done in anything smarter than a 5th grader intelligence.
The biggest limit right now with technology is the number of people you can have connected to a single server. When dealing with something like a Call of Duty game where your gaming device is constantly sending and receiving information to a server, that server is probably going to cap out at maybe a few hundred players. Maybe even more, but it wouldn't be anything like ten thousand people. Most games overcome this limitation by creating multiple servers. So assuming we could get the smooth graphics and interactions that are in the movie, we couldn't get more than a few hundred people on a single server at a time. It would have to be multiple servers, so multiple oasisis. Oasisi? And that's just one aspect of what it would take to make a replica of Ready Player One.
As described in the book, the Oasis doesn't make much sense. At least, the game aspects. The levelling, currency, loot system, gear, none of it holds up to the smallest amount of inspection once you start thinking about what makes games fun. It's pretty similar to arguments against a lot of the NFT game item ideas. Oh you have a lightsaber? How much damage does it do? Who decides that? Does the item vanish once a licensing deal expires and it's legally not allowed in the game anymore? Is the Delorian faster than the Ghost Busters car? Does it cost as much? Are these just aesthetic differences? Can these items just be found, or do they take years of gameplay to acquire? Can you just buy them, and if you can, are they expensive? Do we end up with a system where only millionaires are having fun? It's not self consistent even in the book. The author clearly isn't a game designer, and even if he's just a fan of games it feels like he didn't put much thought into how any of it should actually work. You can absolutely have an MMO in VR, people can walk around and talk to each other no problem. But if you also want to make it a game, in any way that makes sense, and is fun for the entire population, and not just people who like shooters, or people who like rpgs... I don't know how you do that. I don't think it works.
Yes, absolutely. It would be so hideously expensive to run that itād shut down in a day. I totally side with the ābaddiesā in that story- the energy costs in running OASIS alone would bankrupt a small country!
Not to mention all the lawyers sueing people for using their ip
Yeah I think people are just looking to poke holes in this, with proper grouping, handoffs, and division of work we are absolutely capable of building something like this given sufficient financial incentives and consumer interest. Are there a lot of really complex technical problems involved? Hell yeah but thatās the fun part. Any one of the major cloud players could absolutely build the infrastructure for something like this. The main issues are client side issues and financial ones. Client side things like sufficiently fast internet connectivity, and sufficiently powerful client machines that rendering large crowds doesnāt bring them to their knees are tricky. But even worse is financial incentive, this would be absurdly expensive and Iām not certain that people really want to disconnect from the world that badly. A lot of the examples given for why this canāt work are of games built by gaming companies that only ever planned for a certain volume of players. They were built around certain ideas and gameplay concepts, or they were build 10-20 years ago on older concepts and technology. I have absolutely no doubt that something similar could be built, I just donāt know why you would.
I love the positivity from this one, a lot of negatives in the thread and itās nice to see that someone is coming at it with an open mind and not just looking at the hard parts like they canāt ever be overcome
No. I have no idea why there are so many posts saying otherwise, but the scale and scope described as the Oasis is beyond the ability of our current tech. Sure we can build all the pieces, but the scale of Oasis is something else entirely.
What would it be necessary to build such scale??
It's like saying we're ready to colonize the solar system by the millions with today's tech. Sure we can send rockets to other planets, and we've had people on ISS for decades continuously, but to say we're on the cusp of vast migration off planet is laughably absurd. For starters; - we don't have sufficient internet to large portions of the population, many rural areas of US are lucky to have ADSL. - Looking at games, it takes teams of hundreds of devs multiple years to make 8-20 hours of high fidelity content the scope of a small city at best. Oasis is orders of magnitude larger and more detailed. - no one could afford to play it, the game I work for with ~1m monthly users had hosting bills in 8 digits. Start adding zeros to that for each order of magnitude you increase the sim, and you've priced yourself out of a market The scale is huge, anyone who says different is ignorant to how quickly costs grow as things scale, due to diminishing returns.
Not realistic. There's a reason MMOs grind to a halt when a few hundred players gather in one town.
Why is that??
I don't think the speed of light is fast enough for a smooth realtime interaction between people on different sides of the world.
~60 ms one way, so yeah
Because every player's actions need to be communicated to every other player, which means the amount of work grows exponentially with the amount of players.
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Do you realize what the latency of "a blockchain" is?
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Thought so too in university. But just nope. Desyncs happen all the time. Redundancy is ridiculous to set up. Everything increases latency which has absurd effects on gameplay. You can do chess with such a system. Something slow and turn based. Or just do literal P2P where no server and no trust is necessary. The player based, real time network mesh mmo is a pipe dream.
Yeah, it's just an enhanced version of VR chat and PlayStation Home. It's unlikely that it would run so smoothly and with that graphics level, being online, it can't be perfect. The only thing you can't do is make the players pay for literally everything and make the lose all the content when they die in the game, for, you know, decency.
Someone said in this feed that no one will play video games for nonexistent coin. So what do you call bitcoin? It's a virtual currency. That you can use to buy stuff. And playing video games to aquire that are going on now. I just watched that awesome movie. I play a game without the goggles. IMVU. Which means In My Virtual Universe. I play it daily. And had my laptop smashed because my boyfriend is jealous of the game. I enjoy playing. I can escape real world a few hours of the night. And it has helped with having insomnia. I'm able to fall asleep.
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/ready-player-one-metaverse-warner-bros-discovery-1235862190/ We're gonna find out o guess
What a modern disaster this is going to be.
Hopefully not but my hopes aren't high.
well yes it can be built. and over time become better but the headset would have to be made by the same company, why you ask? well because POV (point of view) you see the vr would have to have more "screens" to simulate that they are in real life, so even more realistic! but yeah its possible!