Infinite Reality by Jim Blascovich And Jeremy Bailenson

From The Week of April 24, 2011

If we make it to the year 2100 without blowing ourselves to pieces, we'll look back on the first two decades of the 21st century as the formative period for one of the most life-altering revolutions in human interaction. Virtual reality... It's been the holy grail for scientists, theorists and authors of science fiction. And though we're not there yet, Infinite Reality describes where we've been and imagines where we're going with a clarity and an enthusiasm that makes the mainstreaming of this technology seem right around the corner.

Mr. Blascovich and Mr. Bailenson, researchers of virtual technology and the human mind for UCSB and Stanford respectively, divide their chronicle of all things virtual into three major sections: the history, the science underpinning it, and where it's headed in the near future. Discussion of the field's history is dominated by various experiments designed to test out how to play with the human brain's perception of the external world. The sscientific component preoccupies itself with ruminations on both the technical difficulties in rendering a three-dimensional, virtual world and how it will interface with the proscriptions of the brain. Finally, and most engagingly, the authors point to games like Second Life as examples of the baby steps towards virtual reality before imagining how true VR will change everything from how we meet friends and romantic partners to how we school our kids. It is a world that promises to leave very little of what we know, of what's familiar, untouched.

Infinite Reality is a provocative piece of predictive non-fiction which is strongest when it focuses on what's to come, picturing the ways in which it will transform our world. The historical and scientific components of the work both suffer in comparison. Virtual reality simply isn't an old enough field to have much of a history and the technical challenges of building absorbing worlds and convincing the brain they are real have yet to be ironed out. It's one thing to run controlled experiments in a lab; it's entirely another to scale this technology up for commercialized use. Nonetheless, the authors are convincing when they suggest that this revolution isn't far off which, for traditionalists, must be a scary thought indeed. (3/5 Stars)