Tech firm AMD says virtual reality will soon be so advanced that humans will choose to live in computer simulations – The Sun

Tech firm AMD, that makes the chips which power PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, believes we will one day move into a virtual world

A TOP technologycompany making virtual reality products is already planning for a time when actual life and virtual reality are indistinguishable.

Chip maker company AMD, which runs Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles, is banking on virtual reality taking over the world.

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Some people have scoffed at early VR headsets such asOculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear, which are expensive and sometimes make the wearer vomit.

But AMDs corporate vice president, Roy Taylor, took to the stage at a virtual reality conference being held in Bristol this week to blast any criticism and predict big things for the future.

He said: To get to photo realism is the next big step, to get to full presence is where we need to get afterwards, when actual life will be indistinguishable from virtual reality.

It seems far-fetched, but last year virtual reality headset sales reached almost one billion, Taylor said.

2016 saw the first virtual reality cinema, the first virtual reality surgery in London and even saw virtual reality used to settle a case in court.

"Remember Timemagazine wrote in 1994 that the internet would not take off," Taylor told an audience at Virtual Reality World Congress on Wednesday.

That said, there's probably some way to go until we abandon the real world. The software is not quite finished yet, thanks to technical obstacles.

And the more detailed the graphics become, the more likely the person wearing the headset is to feel nauseous.

Wires also get in the way, limiting gamers' movements.

But Taylor said that AMD might just have the answer, thanks to a new chip design which uses beamforming - a way to send signal to a direct target (unlike WiFi, which broadcasts signal to a wider area).

Taylor hinted it could be a component of the Xbox's virtual reality gaming, which is rumoured to be launching later this year as part of new console, Project Scorpion.

Computer simulations are already having a huge impact on the world we live in.

Scientists recently showed how subjects were able to catch virtual tennis balls that turned out to be real.

That means they were catching the balls without ever seeing the direction they were being thrown in.

Similarly, researchers have used virtual reality to make people feel they are having an out of body experience.

They believe it could cure society's fear of dying, as subjects all said they felt more positive about death after the experiment,

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Tech firm AMD says virtual reality will soon be so advanced that humans will choose to live in computer simulations - The Sun