Imagine being able to scale Mount Everest from the safety and privacy of your own home. Even better, what if you could have your own ski lodge at the top? While this is utterly impossible in the real world, advances in Internet technology may make it possible to create this experience virtually sometime in the near future. The tremendous advances in information technology our society has experienced are already far beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. We already have primitive 2-and-3-D virtual worlds, so why can’t we go further and make perfect simulations of life?

The Internet is possibly one of the greatest achievements of civilization. There is no other place where people can interact freely and disregard the boundaries and limits of the physical world. The ability to use a perfect simulation of life would expand on the current properties of the Internet to make a new frontier for virtual experiences. Instead of just having a website, companies could set up a virtual 3-D replica of their office, bringing information acquisition and business transactions to a whole new level. People would be able to virtually visit perfect replicas of exotic locales, spawning a new sector of tourism. These are only some possibilities of how availability of perfect simulations would affect humans, and there are infinitely many more ways this technology could be used.

There are already primitive representations of the world delivered over the Internet, but these are all imperfect simulations. Called virtual worlds, they offer users a virtual experience in a world they can modify and improve on. One of the social obstacles to making perfect replicas is the lack of standardization and consistency in the programming behind virtual world, because every program is an autonomous little kingdom. Each of these organizations has a different managerial structure and different software requirements. In order to start working towards perfect replicas, there would need to be one overarching virtual version of the Internet that used a standardized language. The addition of this virtual dimension would expand simulations from the province of a few scattered virtual worlds into a new component of the World Wide Web. Through a consistent and standard basis, everyone would be using the same dimension, allowing for experimentation with gradually more complex simulations.

Standardization would also focus efforts on overcoming technological obstacles to a perfect world simulator. Such a dimension would require either massive amounts of bandwidth or the development of new content streaming technologies, due to the vast amount of data needed for rendering the simulation. In addition to the data transmission issue, there is also a display issue. By “perfect”, I mean indistinguishable from the real world, a feat that is impossible with today’s graphics technology. New graphics drivers and systems will need to be designed that are capable of displaying natural colors at a extraordinary high resolution. However, since graphics involve a high amount of data transmission, the data transmission issue would need to be solved first. Once these issues are solved, the Internet would be fully capable of represented the real world, although in a fully modifiable format. The interface would mirror real world actions and behaviors, exponentially reducing the time necessary to learn the system.

As the interactivity of the Internet increases, it is possible that one day there could be a virtual simulation of real life as a dimension of the World Wide Web. Such a development would require improvements in graphics quality and data transmission, methods, but would further break down barriers by increasing accessibility to resources and revolutionizing human behavior.

# # #

Geoffrey Plourde, a graduating senior at Six Rivers Charter High School, is the winner of the Redwood Technology Consortium’s 2010 Don Wolski Memorial Scholarship. Geoffrey was honored at a community luncheon on June 10.

Copyright 2010 Eureka Times-Standard Newspaper. The print version of this article first appeared in the 6/28/10 edition of the Times-Standard.