Reality Distortion fields and future tech

Apple CEO Steve Jobs caused a stir today, making a $3 billion investment in little known UK firm, Reality Distortion.

The fictitious company develops solutions which integrate computer-created VR with a form of kiosk technology and enables the creation of 360-degree, all-round immersive visual environments.

In future, the company revealed in a 23 September 2005 financial report, it is also exploring ways to replicate sensations of sound, smell, heat, condensation and touch, using existing solutions.

Woody Allen's take on these technologies was virtual reality sex machine, the Orgasmatron. However, Reality Distortion's proposal is more like Star Trek's Holo-deck, a controllable multimedia environment for all your senses.

Reality Distortion CEO Thesis Aylie said: "We will create a network of connected public kiosks which let customers users put themselves inside an environment. These could be a geographical location, an emulated social situation, anything we can build. In future, we hope to enable users to create their own environments".

He admitted that full-scale environmental exploration "isn't there, yet", but claimed his standards-based prototype system could be enabled for gesture-based controls, so could already be used as a physically immersive interface for virtual reality, Second Life.

Reality Distortion has chosen to use Apple's Darwin OS core to develop the software. "We don't require all the features of a full OS at this point," Aylie said.

"We see a need for web and email access, but our solution allows client access. We don't want customers to find themselves meeting a black-hat-hacker while they explore a different reality."

Reality Distortion plans to bring its products to the market by 2012. "Our model predicts the social and technological situation will be right for personal technologies which favour deep, short-term escapism by 2012," Aylie explained.

This is a blog entry that's made up entirely of rumour, fantasy and idle speculation, but it's not impossible, right? To recap - this entire entry is made up of fake news, the news of the future.

• Email
• Print
• Permalink
• Contact Us

• RSS
• Digg
• Tweet

Email A Friend

Email this article to a friend or colleague:

PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story, and in case of transmission error. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.

Permalink This Article

This articles permalink is:
http://www.macworld.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=87&blogid=8

Comments received

EmporerEJ said on Tuesday, 27 February 2007

I would suggest you might want to make it more apparent your story is "fake" from the outset.
It tripped My news tracking filters as "Real News."
I see you are just having fun, but I think you might be confusing the public in general.

JonnyEvans said on Tuesday, 27 February 2007

It's a blog item - since when did anyone see a blog item as real news without applying a critical filter?
Our news section's in the news section.

davidfanning said on Wednesday, 28 February 2007

I think there is plenty of warning that it is fake. You wouldn't want to go the CNN route, now that they publish a story from The Onion every week. Check this out for explicit the SATIRE warnings.
www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/21/onion.imagination/index.html