Friday, January 4, 2013

What You Can Pay the Locals To Do

The future of tourism?
Despite improvements in telepresence, most virtual “traveling” amounts to little more than staring at a screen and listening to headphones. In an effort to provide a more immersive sensory experience, the Ikei Laboratory at the Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design is developing what it calls “virtual body technology.” Unveiled at the Digital Contents Expo 2012 in Tokyo last October, the system claims to use all five senses to provide a virtual experience akin to inhabiting another person’s body.
I wonder if the rental price of someone larger and stronger will be higher. Will we be able to pay someone to go punch someone else out? And of course Rule 34.

7 comments:

mikey said...

Ahh, I see.

YOU have the sex with a hooker and HE gets the STDs...

Dragon-King Wangchuck said...

Virtual smell technology? The future never seemed so goatse

Hamish Mack said...

The Ole Professor will be into this like a train.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

In an effort to provide a more immersive sensory experience, the Ikei Laboratory at the Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design is developing what it calls “virtual body technology.” Unveiled at the Digital Contents Expo 2012 in Tokyo last October, the system claims to use all five senses to provide a virtual experience akin to inhabiting another person’s body.

You'll wonder how William Gibson was able to call it... simstim stardom, here I come!

.I wonder if the rental price of someone larger and stronger will be higher. Will we be able to pay someone to go punch someone else out?

Pohl was the one who called this.

Smut Clyde said...

a virtual experience akin to inhabiting another person’s body.

A VR simulation of being a tapeworm? THIS IS THE FUTURE.

Smut Clyde said...

Pohl was the one who called this.

HA! BBBB is thinking of "We purchased people" from 1974. But there are earlier examples of the trope, i.e. an Analog story from about 1972 which I can't be bothered right now to visualise the page in enough detail to read off the date.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

HA! BBBB is thinking of "We purchased people" from 1974. But there are earlier examples of the trope i.e. The Day the Icicle Works Closed, published in 1960, which is the story BBBB was thinking of, old chum.