Immersive Virtual Reality Is All About the Turing Test

While the technical specifications and modes of interaction with modern computers and gaming systems continue to advance, we are still quite a long way from graphics, sound, and user interface that provide a life-like experience. Even so, a properly programmed virtual world could be extremely immersive if the focus was in the right place. Imagine a game world where it is impossible to tell which characters are controlled by real humans. If the ugly troll might be your cousin, and that swamp rat could be your neighbor's pet, while the friendly paladin might simply be a computer character, the world suddenly has some moral ambiguity.

The key to a new breed of virtual reality is the Turing test. Simply put, the idea is that a true test of artificial intelligence is whether you can interact with it and a human being and not know which one is the computer.

Most of the immersive games up to this point have primarily focused on hack and slash. World of Warcraft (or a decade ago Diablo II) allowed people to create a virtual personality and go around looking for evil to slay and treasure to liberate. Other virtual worlds focus only on the social aspect. Services like Second Life let people set up homes and environments and communicate via avatars. The web site, Virtual Worlds Review, lists almost 30 such games.

Some single player games have started to introduce the idea of players choosing their character's morality. Most notable in this genre are Black & White and Fable. Both have sequels in the works. These games were novel in their approach to the characters' interaction with the world. Stealing, killing civilians, and other "evil" acts are allowed. The game tracks a characters' behavior and changes accordingly.

An evil character in Fable has grown horns.

While it is a start for games to apply their own interpretation of ethics, having the world apply real, natural consequences seems even more interesting. If you have no idea whether that troll is computer- or human-controlled, attacking it without provocation becomes much more problematic. Say you kill a real player's troll character. He may have friends or family in the game or even the ability to be resurrected. Those characters could either seek revenge or go through the legal system and seek justice.

This would lead to many new types of game play. Being a thief stealing from both "real" and artificially intelligent shopkeepers adds a new level of potential danger. Some characters might specialize as bounty hunters, tracking down the miscreants. Even the details of a world could vary to increase player interest. Some communities could be frontier towns with only personal revenge type justice, similar to the Old West. Others would be more "civilized" and have complete systems of laws and consequences. Racial prejudice from place to place or outright war would add further interest.

All of this could be realized with existing technology if only people were allowed to play a wide variety of roles in the virtual world and the computer characters became smart enough to blend in with the humans. If Turing is satisfied, the game world would be very satisfactory.

Nintendo Wii: Good but Not Too Good

Sales reports have consistently shown the Nintendo Wii to be leading the pack when it comes to current generation game consoles. Back when the Wii was just the conceptual "Revolution" I predicted and hoped that it would indeed revolutionize gaming with its user interface innovations. The Wii has been successful because it is good but not too good.

The most obvious interpretation of this statement involves the price/performance trade offs that console manufacturers face. While Sony and Microsoft chose to continue escalating the technical specifications of their hardware Nintendo took a middle ground approach. The Wii does HD but not 1080 resolution. It has a DVD drive but doesn't play movies (let alone Blu-ray or HD DVD). In all respects the system has less power than the competition, but by choosing lower hardware requirements Nintendo was able to deliver a more affordable, smaller console.

A less apparent application of good but not too good is an aspect of human nature that I believe will foretell near term advances in virtual reality (VR). On the commentary for one of the early CGI movies (it may have been Shrek, but I don't recall) the animators talk about a phenomenon whereby people started to dislike the characters if they became too close to real. It seems the human mind is happy to place itself in a state of suspended disbelief when what it is experiencing is clearly unbelievable. We don't watch a Roadrunner cartoon and complain that there is no way the coyote could survive that fall. The problem for movie makers occurred as animated characters started approaching reality. At that point people would look at them and know that something was "not right" but not necessarily be able to put their finger on it. The computer graphics had passed the threshold of being obviously fake but had not yet reached the point of being believable. They were too good for their own good and actually had to be made less realistic.

The same logic can be used with virtual reality and the Wii. Nobody would claim that waving around a remote control truly gives you the same experience as swinging a tennis racket at a ball or slicing a goblin with a sword. Yesterday I was reading about haptic interfaces. The Webopedia article states, "For example, in a virtual reality environment, a user can pick up a virtual tennis ball using a data glove. The computer senses the movement and moves the virtual ball on the display. However, because of the nature of a haptic interface, the user will feel the tennis ball in his hand through tactile sensations that the computer sends through the data glove, mimicking the feel of the tennis ball in the user's hand." This is certainly far above what the Wii's controller offers. Will this be the next generation of gaming? I don't think so, and the reason is that it defies the good but not too good philosophy. When games start to mimic tactile sensations it butts up against the "close to reality but just not right" barrier. I'm sure such a device would be interesting to try, but in order to lose ourselves in the experience of a game, just like with a movie, we either need to be in a clearly non-real environment or so totally immersed that it is difficult to distinguish what is and is not real.

It's been over a decade since Pixar introduced us to full length CGI animation with Toy Story. Movies are just now approaching the use of fully realistic human characters. While VR has also been in development for decades, the Wii gaming console is definitely the largest real world application of virtual reality concepts. Before the next level of immersive VR is achieved the industry will have to overcome the problem of being too close to reality without being close enough. In my opinion this will likely take the next ten years. In the meantime there is plenty of opportunity using the current technology for unbelievable games to be incredibly fun.