Virtual reality is an interesting thing to think about. Playstation@home has joined in the idea that the Nintendo Wii seemed to have started with the Mii characters and what the Xbox 360 did with the cartoon avatars and made it far better. The Playstation 3 team seemed to be after detail and realism rather than a cartoon abstract figure depicting you, the player.

Playstation@home allows you to talk to people from various parts of the world that speak your language. The virtual world seems to be growing by adding on malls, stores, restaurants and bowling alleys with arcades. There is a wide variety of different body gestures that you can do. Several different dance moves from salsa to rock. Playstation@home is a hit and a great incentive for people to move over to the Playstation 3.

With the Xbox 360, Halo 3 was the reason to buy but now the Playstation seems to be the new hot console. There are some complaints about how you have to pay real money to get accessories and clothes but if you want you can win clothes by playing arcade games and getting high scores.

One interesting thing is that you can play games inside of a game. The first 3d game that I had seem feature this concept was Doom 3 and the Turkey Puncher game that you could play in it. However, there is more of a variety of things you can do in Playstation@home. The arcade games that can be played are titled Echochrome, Carriage Return, and Ice Breakers. But you prefer to play more classical games with other people you can play chess in the mall with other people or bowl in the bowling alley.

Games inside of a game were used in 3d games to make a game feel more real because a game is usually seen as separate from reality. Also it was a way to show off the innovative ideas and sophisticated programming that developers have achieved.

I recall watching a movie by Stephen King titled The Lawnmower Man. The movie covered the idea of a virtual reality quite well at an early age when computer graphics was primitive. Interestingly a scientist offered the Lawnmower Man help. He said that he could make him smarter with a few vitamins, steroids, and the virtual reality. As a stereotypical Stephen King film, something had to go wrong and it did. The Lawnmower Man got too smart. The intelligence combined with some aggression gave him twisted ideas and super powers that were naturally dormant in the average mind.

Other video games show that virtual realities can simulate realistic people. In a game titled Metal Gear Solid 2 orders are given by an art-official intelligent general. The idea of a virtual reality, in my opinion, will not be a bad thing at this point in time because we can easily distinguish it from reality.

In the novel and movie titled A Beautiful Mind we see that John Nash is troubled with hallucinations of people that do not really exists or who had existed once in his life. He is confused and does not realizer they are all apart of his mind until he realizes they do not age like most people. A key difference in the mind and reality. There is a limit to what virtual realities can simulate but with future technology around the corner there is perhaps no limit to simulating an accurate reality that people may not be able to distinguish from "reality". Quantum computers that do calculations at a subatomic level using electrons could easily out preform computer simulations today and perhaps help us create false realities to a certain degree.

In a movie titled Cube 2 Hypercube we see that the technology is already in use and the military is testing it out. I am not sure if the people were hooked up to a complex computer or put into a real system that could manipulate itself and create alternative realities. The system turns out to be a complex puzzle that only one person will solve.

This idea of a virtual world is best seen through the Matrix. Robotic machines have created a world that maintains humans and the baby humans supply the robots with energy. It is interesting what drives the robots to maintain and create such a reality but it is evident that the robots or agents have emotions and natural desires to preserve themselves.

The idea of a virtual world is interesting to consider from a scientific perspective because if we could accurately describe reality and do experiments scientists could easily save resources and money that would go into a real world experiment.