Skip to main content

3d head mounted displays in violent games. One abstraction too close?

Media_httpwwwblogcdnc_mhsnp

I saw this article on Engadget about the Sony 3d headset earlier and I immediately thought about it's application in gaming. To be fully immersed in a game like Modern Warfare would be amazing. You would have surround sound (hopefully) and be able to see everything that is going on around you.

My only worry about this, as video game graphics get more and more realistic is the potential psychological impact this degree of realism could have on gamers. After a serious gaming session I certainly find it hard to sleep sometimes and the sound of gun fire can be ringing in my ears for hours! Being able to stab someone with extreme realism and with so many senses being catered for I'm not sure how I would feel. In my case, being a sensible adult with no urge to stab most real people I think it would be overall a good experience still.. until the realism was hiked up even further. Would I still want to play it? I'm not so sure.

With parents utter inability to stop buying these type of games for their children (illegal or not) I wonder what lasting effects it would have on the next generation? A 7 year old boy being completely immersed in a war game for several hours a day can only be a bad thing surely?

On a different note I thought about the potential such devices could have in my profession (software development) to be in some sort of Matrix like environment similar to gate keepers of Zion would be amazing. With the help of some sort of special gloves, the ability to construct program logic by hand would be excellent. Even with this, I wonder what the long term effect from working in this environment for 8hrs a day would have to me. As I often code at home for fun as well and game it could potentially be from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. That's a slightly more scary thought.

This type of immersive technology is fantastic and I can't wait, but several ethical questions must be asked when it finally comes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating star ratings in HTML and Javascript

I'd searched around a little for some shortcuts to help in doing this but I couldn't find anything satisfactory that included the ability to pull the rating off again for saving. I'd ended up coming up with this rather cheeky solution. Hopefully it helps you too! This is my first post in a while (I stopped blogging properly about 8 years ago!) It's strange coming back to it. Blogger feels very crusty and old by todays standards too.

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi

An instantiated object should be "ok"

I've been QA'ing quite a bit of work recently and one common theme I've noticed across both Java and C# projects I have been looking at is that we occasionally open ourselves up unessacarily to Exceptions by the way objects are being created. My general rule of thumb (which I have seen mentioned in a Pluralsight video recently but also always re-iterate in various Robust Software talks I have done) is that you shouldn't be able to create an object and then call a method or access a property that then throws an exception. At worst, it should return null (I'm not going to moan about that now). I've created an example below. We have two Dojos, one is good and one is bad. The bad dojo looks very familiar though. It's a little class written in the style that seems often encouraged. In fact, many classes start life as something like this. Then as years go on, you and other colleagues add more features to the class and it's instantiation becomes a second