San Francisco: A top virtual reality scientist has said that the popular sci-fi film The Matrix, which depicts a future in which humans experience the world in a simulated reality, could become a fact someday.
Chief scientist from Facebook-owned virtual reality (VR) experts Oculus Michael Abrash, said The Matrix provides the best sense of what virtual reality could someday be like, reported the Daily Mail.
Speaking at the social network’s annual F8 conference in San Francisco, Abrash used optical tricks to prove that the humans are merely “inference machines” and the world we see now is already an illusion.
“While science fiction novels gave me the conceptual framework for thinking about VR, it was The Matrix that made me believe in it,” Abrash said.
“Even though it was based on technology that won’t exist for decades, if ever, The Matrix gave me a deep sense of what VR could someday be like. Not only how real it could be, but also how exciting it would be to bend and stretch that reality,” he was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
To sum up what is VR, Abrash quoted a speech made in the movie by Morpheus, the character played by Laurence Fishburne, who says, “What is real? How do you define real? If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
Abrash continued, “Unlike Morpheus, I’m not offering you a choice. No matter what choice you pick, we’re all headed down the rabbit hole together.” Abrash added that most people focus on the ‘virtual’ in virtual reality, but we should be focusing on the latter.
He gave the example of vision. Humans only have three colour sensors, we can’t see infrared or ultraviolet and we have a blind spot in each eye.
“Our visual data is actually astonishingly sparse and even if we were able to accurately record and process every photon that reaches our eyes, we’d still have too little data to be able to reconstruct the world accurately,” he said. Abrash used the recent black and blue/white and gold dress as an example.
