The Future

Buck Rogers

Predicting the future is not my strength. I have a closet full of track suits because I thought that is what we would all be wearing when the future arrived, but we are not. Logan’s Run (1976), and Lost in Space re-runs lied to me. Whenever I wear a full track suit I proclaim that “I am future man!” and by the time the words are out, that moment is in the past. 

I tend not to look too much towards the future because I end up paralyzed by fear.

Between the ages of eight and ten years old I thought there would be no future. I would lay awake, tense, freaked out and wondering when the nuclear bombs would drop. Before I turned 25 everyone would be gone, no future.

No Future

My worries of the future fall along the lines of, what will happen when my home is invaded by the dregs of my neighborhood. I wonder if the next bullet that enters my house will end up hitting me or my wife. It is hard for me to see a positive future. Mostly I envision a world raped of its resources, people killing each other for dumb reasons, and maybe, just maybe, computers will gain true A.I., taking over the human race and space. All I know about the future is that mortality is a bitch because I also fear death.

Thoughts such as these cause plenty of stress. Hopefully quick healing nanobots that inject regeneration cells will be invented before I die. Until then, air conditioning will preserve my youth.

Well, looking to the future got depressing really quick. So I will change the subject to future innovations.

I had the opportunity to play with a virtual reality gaming device called the Oculus.

The Oculus is a clunky head-set with a protruding visor that covers your eyes. After the head-set is in place, the player puts on headphones for total gaming immersion. The point is to fool your brain into believing that you are in another world.

Virtual Reality

I tied four games on the Oculus, a haunted house game, a deep sea simulator, a roller coaster, and TRON.

Once in a game the player can turn 360 degrees, seeing everything in the gaming world. The experience was odd. When the roller coaster climbed to the peak of its pixelated world, I could look down before I dropped, and my belly was filled with butterflies. The deep sea and haunted house were solidly created worlds. At one point I walked through a dead horse and my brain tried to tell my legs that they should be feeling something. It was a weird sensation. The TRON light cycle game almost made me puke, so I quit playing with the Oculus and stayed nauseous for about twenty minutes after.

After playing the Oculus, I envisioned a future not too far off from the world Ernest Cline created in his novel Ready Player One. Once Oculus becomes as comfortable as wearing sun glasses, and the pornography industry get involved, no one will leave their homes. We will work, shop, and go to school, all inside a virtual world.

For now I see is a new kind of virtual existence and evolution for the future. That is unless the robots come to power and destroy mankind.