Interactive Design for New Media and the Web

23Where Is It All Going?

 

 

What may be most amazing about the vision of Ray Bradbury’s PlayRoom, which we described at the very beginning of this book, is how well it dramatizes the entertainment medium of the future. I feel that Bradbury described it as clearly as Jules Verne described the submarine in his book 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea. Yet, as gripping as it was, Bradbury’s PlayRoom was never as fully realized as the same concept has become in the films and television programs of recent years.

Virtuosity, the 1996 action film, told of a massive, virtual reality police training simulator whose main feature was a virtual adversary with a personality that was a mix of the greatest villains in history. Virtuosity’s forte was to create the ...