The point about VR games are that they’re an unrealistic escape. If you wanted a 1:1 with actual reality then you wouldn’t need Virtual Reality in the first place.
What? Why?
A 1:1 with reality that is cheap and convenient enough to be an equivalent to modern smartphones would be an honest to god revolution.
Imagine face-to-face social media where a group of 20 strangers from all over the world and across 13 different socio-culutral groups are sitting down drinking virtual beer (which is actually just your perspective if you prefer beer, the orange-juice-loving person in the group is seeing the whole group drinking orange juice) and discussing the latest celebrity scandal. All of the cosmopolitanism and variety of social media, none of its artficiality and bullshit.
(Off course there is going to be new bullshit in this world, people will go through various hoops to pull idiotic pranks on other people and scammers will have a terrifying field day with the new convincing techniques the new medium will bring, but at this point this is just more or less real life. Real Life In Your Pocket that is. (hopefully eventually, it will have a PC phase first). Who is not excited by that?)
Imagine a professional like an airline pilot or a heart surgeon transmitting a read-only record of a flight or an operation, complete with haptic feedback and a temperature-and-wind reconstruction of the transmission environment. Imagine those records dumped to storage and serving as humanity's Library Of Crafts, a correction to our ancient shortcoming of only being able to capture in symbols what could be said (and with photography and microphones, what could be seen or heard), but not what could be felt or experienced.
Won't this absolutely revolutionise learning and communication? There is a very clear path from here to eventual Greg-Egan-style post-singular communication where you are roaming freely in abstract structures residing everywhere from your head to a server in orbit.
Every thought or system or structure ever dreamt up by the human mind began with a 1:1 snapshot of reality that was then further filtered and compressed (Hume's golden mountain). The ability to arbitrarily construct, store, transmit and reconstruct 1:1 ever-more-convincing sensory representations of the world at will is nothing short of a revolution comparable to the invention of language.
Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket, too. It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Why so? the first 3 paragraphs are 2 examples of why a 1:1 reconstruction of our world on demand can be an amazing thing, the remaining is the statment 'All creation or innovation that the human brain does, or is ever capable off, is simply mixing and remixing its readings of the outside world. So mutable and cheap on-demand reconstructions of the outside world will be an immense boost to creativity and innovation'
>Why are we all drinking OJ/beer?
Why are we exchanging asynchronous plaintext blocks right now instead of speaking on the phone or sharing 30-seconds videos on tiktok? This is the medium we chose, this is the medium the hypothetical group in my example chose. (from a sea of possibilities that make our communication options right now look like ancient letters)
>Can we taste it?
If the hypothetical social media app we're talking about is any good, it will have the option to sync your avatar to real-life-you on various 'motion paths', so that whenever you move along those motion paths, your avatar move in the same way. One of those 'motion paths' is all the movements your hand make when holding an actual drink, which would translate to your avatar mirroring the movement in the meta verse.
What happens if you release the drink ? you have the option of making the renderer either disappearing it or (for fidelity) putting it in a corresponding location in the dream. What happens if you can't or don't want to drink? you have the option to either make the renderer hallucinate a drink (along with believable drinking animations at believable intervals) or just make you appear in the dream as you are in meat space.
What happens if/when the marriage of neuroscience and computers get fruitful enough that this whole thing is being served directly to your neurons, bypassing the many middle men in your eyes, ears and skin? You can have the additional option of eschewing physical mirroring of the meta verse and just have the gear directly stimulate the feeling of drinking whenever you drink in the metaverse.
>If so, I can't mention how this beer tastes to my random group of 20 worldwide strangers [...] without risking giving up the lie?
Lie? Am I lying to you right now because my username is not the full name registered to my national number in my country's official records ? is the jvm lying to the code running inside of it by presenting virtual method calls as a hardware primitive? This is make-believe, the whole entirety of human civilization is built on it. Even my real name is no more real than the username I chose for this account, except merely by the virtue that more of my existence (more records, more of my opinions, more memories in more heads,...) is attached to it.
You have the option to say you're presenting as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of pretending to present as yourself-in-the-real, you have the option of not doing that and saying to your group you're just making the renderer playing tricks on them, and on and on it goes. Whole ecosystems and apps will develop conventions and preferences toward particular options.
>that all understand English and American
This is entirely orthogonal to the technology under discussion, the internet have made millions want to understand English so they can communicate with a greater pool of people, and when cyber communication becomes as deep and convincing as the vision of the metaverse, untold millions more will be motivated to understand popular languages, and will be able to more efficiently than now because language learning (as all learning) will become much more effective and joyful, imagine the high-fidelity virtual/recorded tourism trips available by the petabytes to every person who wants them.
Again, when/If AI or neuro+cyber ever reach the moon they are aiming for, this will integrate nicely with the vision of the meta verse by, respectively, a real-time translation engine running in parallel or direct brain-to-brain telepathy, but even without this the metaverse faces a problem of languages that is no easier and no harder than the internet, which I see it handles perfectly fine.
>(that all understand English and American culture enough for me to gossip about US celebrities apparently?)
I didn't specify English or American exactly, I myself am a Middle Easterner with worse-than-average [knowledge of | interest in] all but the most popular celebrities even in my own country. International or regional celebrities have worldwide following even now and even by purely traditional media, and the internet have made the word 'celebrity' expand in very weird directions.
>Real Life In My Pocket? I already have Real Life Outside Of My Pocket
"Electronic computers, why!, I already have pen, paper and my trusty slide rule right here my good sir. I see no purpose those 'electronic brains' of yours can serve"
>It's not a utopia yet, I don't see why putting it in my pocket would magically make it so.
Nobody ever said it would, it's a very specific vision* with a very specific claims : We will construct our own sensory reality. Whatever can be fixed or made (much much) better by constructing and manipulating indistinguishable-from-the-real-thing sensory models of reality, this vision is implicitly claiming it would fix or make it better. This is a gargantuan subset of. humanity's problems. Whatever can't be fixed by this alone, won't, and nobody ever claimed otherwise.
* :When I say 'vision', I mean the actual vision advanced by visionaries like Greg Egan, Gibson, and others in their works, not the garbage copied-and-pasted from the marketing brochures of corporations jumping on the trend, or for that matter those marketing brochures themselves, which are a watered-down inferior version of the visionaries' vision. I'm just as opposed and unbelieving of the promises those companies make as anyone who ever read a headline or two about them, I just still believe in the underlying dreams they are appropriating/butchering.
People don't want to be completely disconnected from physical reality. The world you described is vulgar to any real human person, honestly it sounds like a cross between Brave New World and The Matrix.
There would be no authenticity of experience in the world you imagine. It'd be people living out instagram fantasies continuously.
Society would eventually devolve into a decadent, fetalistic world marked by the boredom of playing a video game with god mode on, where humans would no longer be able to deal with hardship or conflict. Bored of travelling to places that don't exist, they'd try desperately to satiate their desire for authentic human interaction by sitting in virtual pubs chatting about the imagined escapades of pretend celebrities.
It’s the same reason we watch super hero movies, read comic books and novels. Escapism. If the virtual world is a 1:1 with actual reality then there is literally no reason to enter the virtual world.
And why are text mediums so popular? Because they’re convenient. VR lacks that same convenience.
But they obviously weren't "a 1:1 reconstruction of our world": You can't all simultaneously be drinking beer and be drinking OJ in the real world, so all the scenarios were false.