This miniseries from 2018 was less an exercise in future speculation than it was an exploration of cyberbullying. There’s a suicide cult at the center of it all and a bunch of messy teenage relationships. They are all into a VR game/hangout, which very much reminded me of Second Life mixed with some MMOs. The most futuristic part of it all was the prevalence of VR (and some AI stuff at the end).
Something you don’t always see in sci-fi VR stories is variety in the headset hardware. I’m not sure how intentional it was or if there was a situation with the prop-makers, but this added to the realism of there being a VR hardware market in this universe – different manufacturers, price points, low-to-high-end models.
They are using traditional screen-based VR headsets. Some have a flip-up screen to see the real world without removing the whole thing from your head.
It wasn’t just the VR headsets that had variety – the controllers were all over the place. Haptic gloves; single-hand controllers; joysticks; even a racing driving wheel when one of them jumped over to a racing game. There were a couple scenes that had no clear control mechanism – perhaps an oversight, or it visually interfered with the scene, or maybe some of the high-end headsets had a neural-linked component.
There was one final element that stood out: sensory input neckbands. They establish that at some point the government intervened to ban these. They have the ability to transmit pain, pleasure, and some range of deeper sensory feedback to the user. Visually, it also helped establish who was part of the “red-pill” group.
