The Future Is Now?

There was a few options of what I could write about today. None of which really took my fancy that much. That was until I saw that there was the official announcement that the PlayStation Virtual Reality headset will be released in October priced at ("only" they say) £349.99.

Virtual Reality!! Come on! It's something that's "existed" for decades but not something we could ever hope to buy for ourselves for our personal entertainment. That's just another level of ridiculous! A lot of people would say something along the lines of "It's like something out of Star Trek" when clearly they've never seen Star Trek as the majority of that technology is not something any of us can hope to see in our lifetime, if ever. Well, maybe. Who knows? And that's the point...who knows what we'll have to use to our advantage some day.

I consider myself fairly lucky to not have had a load of screens for entertainment as a child. I have never said "I wish I had an iPad when I was little" because I'm really quite glad I didn't. Imagination was a big part of my childhood and therefore I've grown up with the spectacular ability of getting completely lost in a make believe world either from a book, a film, a game or of my own making. Although I had 2 brothers and a sister, they were a lot older than me so I spent most of my time just playing on my own unless Christopher (9 years older than me) decided he wanted me to stand in goal (the window) and blast one of those small sponge footballs at me - gardening gloves as my protection along with my fairly impressive reflexes. Believe me; that skill was a lifesaver.
I'm not really what society would class as a "girl" or "feminine", it'd probably label me as "tomboy". You probably saw from my previous post that I don't agree with this kind of thing - people look how they want to look, enjoy doing what they enjoy doing and be with whoever they happen to fall in love with. Nothing more to it. I had Barbies that I would play as anything from a teacher to a racing driver. I loved toys that involved construction like Lego or K'nex; I even had a robot that you had to learn how to get it to do what the remote control  You know the sort - all those boys toys I shouldn't have had! Oh and while I'm on that subject - well done to Toys R Us for getting rid of the "boys' toys" and "girls' toys" sections...top marks.

Saying that though, we are really lucky to live in an era of such huge advances in technology. Yes, we might immediately just think "ooh that looks like fun" but these things are actually coming in pretty handy for some people's wellbeing. There is a hospital that is using virtual reality for their patients to help combat some of the stress and probably even the pain that comes with being stuck in a hospital bed. It's shown signs of relieving symptoms of depression; letting people whose dream is just to escape the world do just that - even for that brief period. And again...who knows? It could go on like this. Other ways of using it can come from anyone and anywhere. It's just giving us a chance to see what more we can achieve, enriching people's lives for just a bit of fun or their health.

The fact that if you happened to have a time machine and brought someone from only 10 years ago into the present they would not know what an iPad is...let alone someone from 20, 30, 40 and further years ago - their minds would truly be blown.
Hopefully we'll continue to learn from all this and find many more ways to use it for good...

Bit of a weird post, this one but it just got me thinking about how far we've come and it's a bit scary to think how quickly too. What's next?!

Falv
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