Sword Art Online

[Kirito]

Do any of you people think there will be Nerve Gear in the near future? I would really love to have that and to play SAO just without deaths . What's your opinion? 

[XII360]

oculus rift, PSVR, Steam VR, i think we're far from getting a nerve gear, but i also feel it wont be that far before a nerve gear comes out, i mean, from what i heard/watched on gameranx, 

we have some studies/experiment about, something related to electric shock in the body, whenever the player gets damaged (which sounds fun, but also sounds deadly), but they did mention, that the voltage are somewhat like, mosquitoe bites ?, so at best it would just tickle the player

thats not to say, someone could hack into it, and make voltage go so high that said player could die

and thus, i have concluded, that, from those experiments, and youtube vids i have watched, we are infact,

probably not close to getting a nerve gear in the future >.>

[efaardvark]

3 hours ago, Kirito said:

Do any of you people think there will be Nerve Gear in the near future? I would really love to have that and to play SAO just without deaths . What's your opinion? 

Not in the immediate future, and not as a consumer item even when it does get here.  At least not at first.  There are already medical devices like cochlear and retinal implants that interface with nerves in primitive ways.  There's also experimental devices that can do things like read your general emotional state, or be used to control "peripheral" devices like robotic arms and legs, or a motorized wheelchair, or operate a keyboard/mouse to use a computer.  There's also been experiments with hippocampal prosthesis.  (The hippocampus is the brain structure that is associated with the autonomic nervous system, emotion, and especially memory.) 

So far most of these are implanted devices because the further you place the sensor from the nerve the harder it is to get a clean signal, and the harder it is to deliver a signal to where you want it.  A lot of that (though not all by any means) can be overcome with better signal processing, and computers are getting better all the time.  We're still a long way - several decades I'd say - from being able to just put on a headset and go full-dive into a game however.  In another decade or so you might be able to get brain implant that allows you to connect an external device to accomplish the same thing, but it'll be expensive and not without risk.  Not something you would likely do casually, like so you can play a game.

I think the biggest impediment to this sort of thing now is that we just don't know how the brain works in enough detail to implement this sort of device.  We've only in the last few years even been able to start getting the kind of data that lets us start figuring this stuff out.  It is going to take a while to figure it all out, then some more time to figure out how to do something like a Nerve Gear safely.

That said, existing VR gear is already pretty good, and getting better.  It isn't "full-dive" by any stretch, but it is good enough to bypass the cerebellum and fool the deeper parts of your brain in certain ways that really facilitate presence and suspension of disbelief, which is really all you're after in a gaming context.  You can easily make people fall over or get motion sick with today's gear.  Even though they know it isn't real, the automatic parts of peoples' brains get the signal and reflexively respond without waiting for confirmation from the cortex.  If done right this sort of thing is very cool.  If not, well, I'm waiting for the VR version of "nintendo thumb" to be announced.    (In fact, a lot of VR research these days is being focused on how to avoid doing those sorts of things unintentionally.)