Just how real is the Net?

[Sigfried Hunin]

Well, unless you're stimming, you still need to bone! (IMO)

[Blue]

When I was thinking of The Net, I was thinking about a place that would be like reality perfected. Kind of like a real world HD. Because they can literally put impulses directly into your brain, they can everything better. If I had to picture a look to the thing, I'd see it looking a lot like Tron, except... well, better. People would create avatars of themselves, so even the people would look perfect.

As for the prostitution thing, I can see that. Stim-jacking, as Sig puts it, isn't quite prevalent yet, but it is on the rise. As people move into a more and more Net-based lifestyle, those things that relied on reality for are in a quick decline. Some prostitutes have probably already gone into business online rather than off, trying to get a jump on things (hehe) while their experience can still be of benefit over the amatures who are sure to start doing it themselves.

[Jonathan Meer]

I'm interested in the freedom of the Net, combined with the not-quite-realness of it. For all the prowess of the modern video game, there are still frequent issues of latency in multiplayer (where experiences do not quite sync up) and graphical oddities. Considering how complex and data-intensive a complete virtual world would be, I see no reason to suppose that these issues would completely disappear. For very high quality games, it's easy to suspend your disbelief, but I suspect there would still be an 'uncanny valley' in virtual reality: that is, the closer you get to fully realistic representation without matching it exactly, the more eerie and off-putting it is for the participant. For this reason, I can imagine a virtual orgasm of 99.7% fidelity being almost terrifying.

(Just bumping this; I still like this idea for the sensation of the net)

[Sigfried Hunin]

Yeah, I also like that idea that there is sensation, but it's very uncanny. I'm not sure how much people would/wouldn't care about its uncanniness though, if they had more-than-perfect visual and auditory stimulus.

[Blue]

I always considered that it'd be a place that would put reality to shame with its grandeur. A place where, quite literally, dreams can come true. Worse than any drug on the market, it could stimulate feelings of contentment, happiness, and even pleasure with very little input. Which is what makes it so dangerous. It's addicting to the extreme, and with hardly any regulations placed on its use, it's become more than just a pastime or occasional diversion. There are people out there who would kill for one more hour on The Net. The decadent, having access to better technology, would of course become even more detached from the people and squalid in their money. Hell, many of them may have fallen to the ranks of the impoverished through too much attachment to this virtual heaven.

[Sigfried Hunin]

WE';ve already heard your opinion on this like, 8 times. We get it.

[Blue]

Maybe, yet the topic was raised once again, so I felt I should once again give my say in the matter.

Edit: All the same, this largely depends on our view of how prevalent The Net is in society. A Net which doesn't take enough of the commerical and private market isn't worth developing to a high level.

[Orion]

@Orion: 'Rules' in the Net depend on the particular virtual hub (think 'web site'). The rules for a teenager's virtual hub could differ from the rules of the official St. Petersburg virtual hub.

So hubs are freely available to anyone? Can every teenager create their own hub if they want? Is it expensive? Is there a limit of hubs a city could have?

[Sigfried Hunin]

I think those are all very interesting questions. From what it seems like, most people have at least one hub in their household, but middle-upper class might have one for each member of the family. I imagine it as basically a large, thick cable built into a chair, pretty much exactly like the Matrix.

I also think that it could be possible for a fairly tech savvy teen to make one, but the results of anything that goes directly into your brain not being juuuust right sound pretty catastrophic to me.

What do you think it should be like, Orion?

[Orion]

I think those are all very interesting questions. From what it seems like, most people have at least one hub in their household, but middle-upper class might have one for each member of the family. I imagine it as basically a large, thick cable built into a chair, pretty much exactly like the Matrix.

I'm confused. Is a hub a "web site" or the physical object used to jack into the Net? Or is it a physical object used to jack into a particular "web site?" I pictured it more that a person would jack into their virtual city for work, but could change where the jack took them by entering a new destination (searching for a website) in the real world.

I also think that it could be possible for a fairly tech savvy teen to make one, but the results of anything that goes directly into your brain not being juuuust right sound pretty catastrophic to me.

Again, I was thinking hubs were more like websites. Having your own personal virtual world outside of the major communal worlds like cities.

What do you think it should be like, Orion?

I would think that creating one's own "web site" would be like real world web design; someone who doesn't know what they're doing and tries to code it themselves will end up with a piece of shit. While creating one's own hub might be possible, it would take technical skill to make it halfway decent. And with the tech being experimental, there may be dire consequences if an amateur plugs into a buggy web site.

I would think too that the technology, being new and experimental, would make people's own hubs rather expensive and difficult to maintain. I could see people paying for these services much like a web design/host company, but it wouldn't come cheap due to the difficulty and fragility of such technology.

Also in the way that the Net is described, I don't see a lot of bending the rules ala Matrix. At least not just with one's will when they are jacked in. It might be possible to run code or scripts that allow certain, normally impossible actions (eg. flight), but I would think this would be tightly regulated.

Those are the thoughts I have for the time being.

[Sigfried Hunin]

I'm confused. Is a hub a "web site" or the physical object used to jack into the Net? Or is it a physical object used to jack into a particular "web site?" I pictured it more that a person would jack into their virtual city for work, but could change where the jack took them by entering a new destination (searching for a website) in the real world.

A hub, as far as we've been speaking about it so far, is an actual physical item that works like, exactly like those chairs in the matrix where a big ass thing gets put into your brain via an implant.

I don't know if we have a term for each "page" or even how one navigates the Net yet. I was behind like a futurama kinda deal where it's just a big city and you can go into like "shops" and those are the sites, OR having like a direct connect thing.

I would think that creating one's own "web site" would be like real world web design; someone who doesn't know what they're doing and tries to code it themselves will end up with a piece of shit. While creating one's own hub might be possible, it would take technical skill to make it halfway decent. And with the tech being experimental, there may be dire consequences if an amateur plugs into a buggy web site.

I share these opinions.

I would think too that the technology, being new and experimental, would make people's own hubs rather expensive and difficult to maintain. I could see people paying for these services much like a web design/host company, but it wouldn't come cheap due to the difficulty and fragility of such technology.

Also in the way that the Net is described, I don't see a lot of bending the rules ala Matrix. At least not just with one's will when they are jacked in. It might be possible to run code or scripts that allow certain, normally impossible actions (eg. flight), but I would think this would be tightly regulated.

Those are the thoughts I have for the time being.

I think that you'd be right about somebody attempting to build their own chair and or "site" or whatever we're gonna call them. I think that a self-built chair could be very dangerous. I think that a self-built site would be all wonky and also possibly dangerous.

I also think that one of the big draws is that each site would allow you to "break the rules," like a modern day video game might but with absolute clarity and realism (minus sensation). That's probably part of the big draw, right?

[Tyr]

Wait, isn't hubs the "websites" of the Net and not the actual plug-in chairs or whatever you want to call them?

"I envisioned the Net as akin to the internet; a series of loosely-connected hubs of varying quality."

Maybe he just means the word hub but in which case I'd like some capitalization going on here or something when we start coining a term.

[Sigfried Hunin]

Whatever you want to call them as long as everybody is saying the same words.

[Jonathan Meer]

I intentionally didn't capitalize it, since I didn't want it to conflict with Chubbs hubs. It's just a noun folks.

[Tyr]

But did you mean akin to the net in the form that it is a connection between a lot of loosely-connected computers as hubs or websites as hubs?

Whatever the case may be, I hope we decide that "websites" are hubs because I feel, as a whole, hub is a silly name for a jack-in chair or whatever. We need a cooler name.

[Sigfried Hunin]

Ok, so as far as I can tell there are at least 2 things that need to have a clear definition:
The "sites"
And the "chair"

[Jonathan Meer]

But did you mean akin to the net in the form that it is a connection between a lot of loosely-connected computers as hubs or websites as hubs?

Whatever the case may be, I hope we decide that "websites" are hubs because I feel, as a whole, hub is a silly name for a jack-in chair or whatever. We need a cooler name.

websites

[Tyr]

Okay, that was just a personal clarification for my own sake, good to know I understood that correctly.

I vote "sites" be dubbed hubs/Hubs. The chairs need a better name than my creativity can dish up with though.

[Jonathan Meer]

We should avoid hubs/Hubs so that we don't conflict with the Chubbs concept of a hub.

Why not just site?

[Sigfried Hunin]

I like "site" because it gives me the image of a place you can actually "visit" in a more literal since than even now. "Hub" to me makes me think of a collection of websites.