This happens _now_ through MUDS and IRC.
The Socially-Disfunctional appear to be always with us.
This will get worse as "Capture" technology advances - you will be able
to Capture the bodily form,
Hmm. Not really necessary. All you have to do is capture someone's
face and stick it on top of any body you care to.
body language, speech patterns, clothing
styles, etc, of anybody, probably without them knowing,
Hmm. I'm not convinced that people will _ever_ be able to capture
_all_ of these things "without the other party knowing." I predict
that people's VR usage patterns will preclude certain kinds of
information being available in the first place.
Speech patterns w/o others knowing - yes, if you can get them to talk
to you over the Internet for long enough.
Body language w/o others knowing - I'm not so sure about this one. I
think it will be awhile before the home consumer has easy access to
high-fidelity body sampling technology, as in enough to reproduce a
person's actual body language. (And now that I've gotten the
techno-quibble out of the way... :-) Why would people transmit their
body language over the Net? Is it really that likely that people will
strap themselves into full body suits with 100's of sensors and wander
around their living rooms to do Internet VR? I think it's far more
likely that they'll sit at a desk and wear visors and a glove.
Probably they'll still use a keyboard to "walk around," or else some
kind of a joystick designed expressly for controlling a simulated
biped.
Clothing styles w/o others knowing - that's some really advanced
machine vision you're talking about. Technically, "it'll be awhile."
Once that's out of the way, the question becomes "Why would people
wear their real life cloths in VR space?" People don't need to use
real bodies, they probably won't use real clothes either. You may be
able to design a "character" in a VR universe, and you might get a
menu of different clothes to wear. (I'd expect to see a lot of people
wearing jeans with pink tutus over them, simply because it would be
amusing. :-) Since many people will probably not do VR every day,
and since they won't change their VR clothing every day the way they
do in real life, you probably won't have a good sense of what someone
wears in real life. Unless that person goes through a lot of trouble
to make it pretty clear what they wear in real life.
and introduce
them into a virtual environment.
This goes well beyond Couch Potato "life"styles.
Although I know we're not supposed to talk about technological
limitations, I think we need to look at how the technologies are going
to condition the way people use VR. Let's say for technological
reasons, people get used to doing VR in certain ways but not in
others. That's going to make certain kinds of VR development more
marketable and consumer-oriented than others. This in turn enforces
some stability as to how VR technology gets used. Hollywood is not to
be believed: ordinary people are going to use VR according to whatever
is cheap, $$$$-wise.
If one is interested in doing VR Art in the present day, then it's
probably worth noting what's going to happen 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50
years from now, and what might never happen. If only to understand
the implications of the medium itself.
Cheers,
Brandon