“Full Dive: This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier Than Real Life!” Yes, the title of this anime is ridiculous – as is a lot of its content. A VR RPG that is so realistic it makes for a horrible gaming experience? Despite the premise, we can take away some VR and AI insights.
The first five minutes introduces what the gaming market looks like in this world. “Full Dive” sensory experience games – direct into the nervous system, capturing all the senses and with AI making NPCs indistinguishable from real people – were too realistic. “Real world problems have no place in recreation.” VR failed in this universe.
The point this show really drives home is that there is a time when virtual reality can become too much like real-life reality, upon which we must ask: is there any value-add by applying tech? This is an extreme case, but there are applications of VR today where this applies. As they describe in the video above, gaming progressed through the current goggles VR to a full dive sensory experience to a regressed old school non-VR experience.
Full dive VR seems to just involve sitting in a special chair (which looks like your typical gaming chair). They illustrate it interacting with the nervous system with a glowing effect. In the narrative we learn the user experiences the full range of sensory experiences, from pain to pleasure – with the pain somewhat diminished from the real world experience. The game can prevent the user from leaving during certain situations like combat. External stimuli seemed like it might be able to pull a user out of the system.
One more little touch was that the main video game in this series came with a pendant, just like the one in the game. As the game progressed with its AI developing a custom story for the user, the pendant they always wear in the game has text with a title reflecting (and updating) to reflect your actions in-game. They didn’t show this, but it would be cool if the real world pendant updated with the same text as in-game at any given time.
Interesting premise and an exploration of a real type of illogical human behavior: willfully engaging in unpleasant activities. While it could make sense to abandon VR that’s too real for gaming, there are plenty of other applications of the tech where full dive sensory and really real experiences are valid and greatly enriched by the tech.
