When will Virtual Reality reach "Ready Player One" Heights?

We are getting there!

Let’s break down the components needed:

1. Haptic gloves - check

2. Haptic bodysuit - check

3. Omni treadmill - check

4. VR headset - check

5. Large Virtual worlds - check

On the surface, we are pretty damn close.

This is me at our office, loaded up with peripherals including haptic body suit, one handed controllers, AR headset, virtual smells (Hapticsol) and an adaptive controller.

Cool stuff, but there are limitations to current tech that make it subpar compared to the realism of Ready Player One. Given that new state VR has only been around since mid 2016, it’s fair to say this tech is nascent, it's just showing off the possibilities.

Let’s reexamine our list and determine what’s needed to get us to Ready Player One levels:

1. Haptic gloves - Need to improve finger tracking to make them fully immersive and error free. See Bendlabs and HaptX

2. Haptic bodysuit - Teslasuit pretty much has everything in the movie and is available today (see my pic above)

3. Omni treadmill - see infinadeck. We are close to having full immersion walkable environments. Need some tweaking to get to the ease of use in the movie, yet not far away

4. VR headset - need improvements to fidelity, weight, size and connect-ability. However, we are close on this one and within a few years similar headsets are absolutely achievable and internet speeds for large data downloads like 5G

5. Large Virtual worlds - this is perhaps the biggest area of needed improvement. While we are close, in the movie they take us over the top in terms of realism, and immersion. They have worlds within worlds. And all are realistic. When we get to this level, it will be pretty scary as how do we differentiate the real world from virtual?

Its hard to give an exact date of when the features of Ready Player One will be achievable, yet by most measurements we are almost there. When do you think we will be able to enter the Oasis?