CYBER PSYCHIC DIGITAL LIFE FORMS  

Bio-technology Is continuing to create diversity and new life forms on this planet. These developments will be the most controversial subject of the 1990s. Running a close second will be the field of Virtual Reality.

Up to this stage in human evolution we have had to face such relatively simple problems as the types of people developing. We will now face new types of humans and a totally new field of cyber psychic digital life forms. These electronic/photonic computergenerated and digitalized "life forms" eventually will be almost indistinguishable from the original. How to handle this? What would you say to someone who is "you", and so like you that even you would have difficulty determining who's who? This exploding and evolving field is a modern day version of the movie TRON. An image of anything can be created on a computer screen including your own picture, then manipulated into any scene and supported with appropriate technology. This includes video projectors, polarized glasses and/or a thin, tight body stocking with built-in piezoelectric, vibro-tactile actuators along with a computer-on-a-wrist glove ... all tied into a sophisticated computer system that allows both operator and observers to enter this computer world and interact with each other and scenes that compose this virtual reality. Within such a world almost anything possible (and many things that are not) in real life can be accomplished. Situations impossible in the real world because of time, distance, physical laws or situations of extreme physical danger, can now be experienced with relative impunity. Like wrestling a grizzly bear, if that has been one of your fantasies.

Not that long ago, if a loved one was far away in another country, the closest contact possible was a hand-written letter sent via train and/or ship. Letters often took weeks to reach their destination and then the sender would have to wait a similar amount of time anxiously awaiting the reply. The telegraph allowed short, quick transmissions of written messages, usually lacking in emotion. Eventually airplanes allowed a speed-up in transmission and quantity. Then Alexander Bell gave us the telephone, verbal contact could be made quickly over extremely long distances. Today, people who have video phones or own a television station are able to both hear and see the person at the other end of a phone conversation. Soon it will be possible to hold, touch, caress, converse with, and share experiences in a mutual electronic/photonic virtual world of unimagined virtual reality.

The technology and resulting effect will change the world more than the automobile. Want to take your grandmother scuba-diving, even though she is 86, can't swim, has emphysema and is bed-ridden? No problem. Hook her up to your computer, where ever you are, via phone and satellite link, put the required evening-gown-like glove on her arm, affix the appropriate head set of eye glasses and earphones and you are off. She can even chose her favorite reef.

The business and economic implications are vast. How many people will want to travel, experience, love and dare in a world limited only by imagination ... where the possible or the impossible can be accomplished in the same amount of time.

Like to design and play a golf course before the first sod has been turned? Simple. Parallel Universe in Calgary, Alberta, is already doing that. Want to design and fly a hypersonic airplane before it's built? Already being done. Want to design and sell the high-tech body suits? Better move fast. Italian couturiers are already designing such super-slinkies.

By hooking designs, say for a new electric-powered automobile, with the 3-D printer made through stereo-lithographic printers in California, your first model can be ready in days, not months or years. You can test drive it before production starts, eliminate any observed defects during the test runs, produce an immediate updated and modified model and put it into production almost immediately. North American auto manufacturers must move fast or these new cars will come from Japan. Perhaps every one of a million production models might be different, designed to each purchaser's different requirements.

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