I've heard a little about the Oculous Rift and what it can do. It sounds amazing. That should be Aprone's next project; create an Oculous Rift that incorperates audio and cutting-edge smell transmitting technology. He already has the See Monkey. Just take that about fifty steps farther.

The term for what Google Glass does is augmented reality and it has a lot of exciting applications, unfortunately conveying that to us is rather more difficult especially without it compromising our ability to hear dangers in our surroundings. You could argue that a talking GPS is a form of augmented reality of course, though the current solutions either have no digital compass at all or don't align it to your physical facing which would be a very nice next step. It'd be expensive but adding a digital compass to some bone conduction headphones like the Aftershokz could be rather interesting since it could reliably tell which direction you're head is turned at least, even if not which way you're facing.

Virtual reality is actually a lot simpler for us than sighted people, take some 5.1 headphones like the Roccat Cave I use and couple it with some kind of tracker for which way your head is facing. Not doing this can in sighted people lead to nausea so I imagine it could do likewise with us, as well as just making things much easier. Combine this with some form of controller, be it a keyboard, trackball or gamepad and you've got the most basic elements. Adding in haptick feedback would be incredibly, incredibly useful though not technically necessary.

The main barrier to the holodeck is the fact that holograms can't be touched and produce no sound. It's possible to use speakers embedded in the walls but unless someone comes up with some very, very clever tricks it'll be hard to make it sound exactly like its coming from the object which we won't be able to touch anyway since a hologram is an image made of light. Star Trek justified this with some explanation involving force fields and replicators, which even if they're possible we're nowhere near them and they may not work in a way which would permit their use in a holodeck.

It's a great idea but so many things from fiction are.

Wow Locutus. I heard about this book a while back I really need to read it. Also for another good story about virtual reality read tad williams's otherland series.
@Cx2 you could create some type of glove that would give you the sense of touching a wall or object. And yes speakers to play the correct sounds during a simulation would be awesome!

Someone really ought to make a movie of that book. Or at least a good solid audio drama. Can you imagine all the awesome ear candy such a project would offer?

hello, how are you guys expected to still play games if all the pc games turn to vr games? it's possible for people with enough rest vision, but what about fokes who are totally blind? they would never be able to play games any more, unless the pc would stay as it is and wouldn't turn into something completely inaccessable. I mean if we're talking startreck with voice input an output for the computers, that'd be great but how do you expect to play games like swamp or rtr in a vertual reality? like in swamp. how as a blind person do you expect to kill a zombie? and you couldn't really have the radars because the radars are a help to blind gamers. Then the matter of nollage comes to mind. I'm one of the people who has never fired a gun. the closest I've ever fired do a gun is a bow, so your weapon usage for games with guns would be rather limmited, unless you'd learn how to fire a gun.