The Game of Life

FUTURE CRAFTING

There’s lurking anxiety in people’s hearts. “What if this never ends?” Countless articles cropped up over the past few months theorizing what a future of living in the shadow of COVID-19 might look like. What permanent changes to our lifestyles should we prepare for? If we find a cure, what does the aftermath look like? Do we scramble back to our daily lives, balance mourning the dead with a 9–5?

One outcome worth considering is the shift to virtual living. I’m not talking about more reliable Zoom meetings or better virtual doctor appointments.

I’m talking about living in a video game: a world where we interact like in real life, but without physically being there.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman from Pexels.

Imagine you wake up, go through your morning routine, and then sit down at your desk. Instead of opening your laptop and checking your email, you pull a comfortable, lightweight Virtual Reality (VR) headset over your head.

As you press back into your chair, you log in and see a digital version of yourself, a persona. You “click” on your character and spawn in your house in the World. A menu appears with your email and schedule. After 15 minutes of wading through email, you get a notification from Jim asking to meet you for coffee outside the office.

You teleport in the game to a virtual office. Jim’s character is waiting on a virtual bench. You walk over to the bench and discuss family life with Jim. In real life, you sip your coffee. After 15 minutes, you both walk into the office and head into a conference room. Your coworkers are all in there. Recording technology has improved such that you can carry on a casual conversation with Jim, who sits next to you, without disturbing/talking over your other coworkers who are chatting before the morning standup.

As 10:00 rolls around and a notification tells you to take a break. You remove the VR headset and go for a walk in the real outside.

I know. It sounds like the start of a Black Mirror episode.

On paper, the whole skit seems outlandish, even borderline fantasy. It’s been a dream of gamers forever to log into a fantasy world like this, though I doubt anyone’s top choice was a 9–5 simulator.

VR, security, sound, and so many other tech fields would need to make leaps and bound to achieve something like this. But I see this as the inevitable tip of an inevitable iceberg.

As developed countries get more and more comfortable doing business in non-physical domains, how long until other areas of life shift to virtual options?

Imagine other VR scenarios: seeing a therapist, hanging out with your family, going to a movie. A year ago if you floated something like this, most people would have never considered doing any of these things virtually. Even if they wanted to, the prospect was unrealistic. Neither the technology nor the demand was there. However, with quarantine exposing the potential of virtual spaces, they’re starting to look like viable options.

As we prepare for COVID winter and look at what the future might hold, I argue it’s not as unrealistic as it sounds.

Image by Bram Van Oost.

A year ago I would have laughed in your face if you told me we might spend more time in virtual environments than we do in real ones. Even now, as I spend 8 hours minimum flipping between blocks of code and Zoom/Skype/Webex/Teams calls, it still seems farfetched.

However, the precedent is there.

The Social Precedent

Take a look at remote work. While not every job can be done remotely, it’s become an appealing option for those that can. As soon as companies realized that meetings and office communication could be done out of the office, companies like Zoom capitalized on that experience. You can already use filters, backgrounds, and emojis to add personality to conference calls. There are features for interacting, such as hand raising, polling, and more.

Education is in a similar boat, though there are concerns to be wary of. (Simon Rodberg outlines some potential pitfalls in his article, School as We Knew It Is Over. What Comes Next?) We’ve seen summer camps offer online courses, and supplementary education sites like Khan Academy are increasingly active. Earlier in the year, many universities opted for virtual commencements. People joked that before long they’d host commencement in Roblox or Minecraft.

At an entertainment level, virtual communities are flourishing. Quarantine has been a dream for gaming, as gamers get to spend hours inside playing games without judgment. As so many people have had to buff up their home office, lots of gamers took the opportunity to upgrade their setups. Outside of gaming, people are devouring content on sites like Twitch, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and more. Even when not at the computer, mobile devices are a medium into your digital persona on the go.

Quarantine is pushing people to think outside of the box. Though many countries are on the verge of recovery, the world isn’t going to snap back to normal once we beat COVID. As we look, ideally with optimism, at social change in the fallout of COVID, technology and its role must remain in the spotlight.

The Technology Precedent

From faster computers to ray/path tracing to physics breakthroughs in games like Half-Life: Alyx, one thing is clear: gaming technology is evolving. This comes as no surprise since the gaming industry has exploded into a $100+ billion-dollar industry that continues to grow. With that kind of interest, we can expect great things in the coming years.

Earlier in 2020, Sony announced the specs for the PS5. While it’s a well-rounded, beast of a machine for the price point (leaks suggest around $500), the real eye-catcher isn’t what you’d expect: it’s the hard drive.

PlayStation 5. Source: Sony.

Specifically, it’s what is called “I/O throughput”, which is the speed at which the hard drive can send and receive data. The PS5 ships with 5.5 Gb/s (raw), putting it leagues ahead of its competition. Xbox Series X ships stock with 2.4Gb/s (raw). The PS4 and Xbox One were in the realm of ~100 Mb/s.

Why is this important? Because it revolutionizes the development process for games and other graphically intensive software.

Assets are what make up a game. They include textures, solid objects, characters, the environment, and more. These assets have to be stored somewhere just like any file. Many of our graphical improvements throughout the years have relied on making better assets, but only up to a certain point. A 3D model of a rock, for instance, is made out of polygons (typically triangles).

You could imagine making a simple “rock” by putting three 2D triangles together, i.e. a pyramid. Because there are only three triangles, it only takes up a small amount of file storage.

That’s not a very lifelike rock, though. To make it more lifelike, we have to add more triangles (polygons). The number of polygons in a model is what is known as “poly count”. The higher the poly count, the bigger the file.

Today much of the high-end rendering and lifelike games that we see have assets with high poly counts, like millions of polygons. These assets are known as “high-poly”, as opposed to a “low-poly” assets like our 3 triangle rock. The more of these high-poly assets a game has, the more data the game has to load. The more data you have to load, the longer you’re waiting for your game to load.

Image by Gordon Johnson.

While there are many techniques to improve graphics without increasing poly-count, this has been a major roadblock for developers for as long as we’ve been making games. You can build the most detailed rock you want. If that rock takes up half a gigabyte in memory, you’re going to be waiting for that to load for a long time. A good developer had to balance load and response times with how pretty their game is and how many assets they load into a scene.

That’s where I/O throughput comes in. In the past, throughput has been too low to manage a ton of high-poly assets. Developers had a breadth of tricks to get around this, but those tricks aren’t perfect. Even with the tricks, they add time and complexity to the development process, hence games and software take longer to build.

Breakthroughs in how we handle those assets as well as the increased throughput speeds change all of this. Instead of having to use all of these tricks, we can just load our assets directly from the hard drive in real-time.

Cool, but why even bring all this up?

Between this and the recently teased Unreal Engine 5, a cutting-edge game engine (what one uses to build games), we may be able to put together games and graphically intensive software far quicker than we do now.

That means if your office wants to throw together a life-like virtual version of their office, it could be a hell of a lot more accessible than today. Of course, the possibilities are endless with technology like this.

From a demo in Unreal Engine 5. There are countless triangles dynamically lit and loaded in real-time.

Imagine, instead of Google Cars driving around and scanning roadways for Maps data, they’re scanning the Earth for model data. There are already companies that do similar things for CGI in movies. If we have the technology to load that data into a virtual environment in real or close to real-time, suddenly it doesn’t seem so farfetched to have a virtual Earth that one might load into.

We have a ways to go before all of the pieces are in place, but the precedent is there.

Image by Alex Iby.

Precedent is one thing, but will it happen?

It’s not a matter of if, but when.

We’re already plugged in, and technology is on a fast track. Take a look at a couple revealing statistics from a collection by Kommando Tech in February 2020:

• “There are over 5 billion mobile users in the world, and more than 3 billion of those have smartphones.”
• “Globally, how much time does the average person spend on their phone in a day? The most recent data indicates that people spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phones.”

15 years ago people were skeptical of smartphones. I can almost hear my mom saying, “Why would anyone ever want to spend time on their phone when they have a computer?”

Now our digital lives are already a part of our physical ones. With this in mind, it’s not hard to conceive of a world where these virtual worlds meld into a uniform experience: your virtual-life and your real-life start to become one.

It might not look like a real-life World of Warcraft, SkyNet, Animal Crossing, or a bunch of agents in tailored suits trying to suppress free will, but it’s only a matter of time before we see something new emerge.

The question we should be asking is: what does that look like?

Cover image by Alex Iby.