Ready to be Player One with PAI?
Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is a nostalgia train hurtling through a virtual reality world, with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references and glimpses into what life would be like if the majority of the world spent most of its time in a virtual simulation.
Whether you see Ready Player One as an unending list of pop culture references wrapped around the rudimentary skeleton of a plot, or as a cautionary tale about the inherent dissociation from spending life strapped to a VR headset — it’s difficult to walk out of a viewing without some curiosity about the technology depicted in the film.
We are quite a ways away from commercial haptic products with kinaesthetic feedback like those in the movie and book, and having billions of players simultaneously engaged in a single game environment would likely overwhelm any server, but many of the more nuanced elements in Ready Player One already exist, or are at least in development.
Personal 3D avatars, for example, are already a key part of ObEN’s technology. We refer to them as PAI (short for Personal AI), and while we prefer ours to mimic the appearance and voice of the actual person, they are certainly customizable in dress and style to suite every individual. This may seem restricting compared to the fantastical avatars of the movie, but book readers will know that the OASIS is so much more than the amped-up video game depicted in the film. In the book, it actually serves as a way for people to access information, education, entertainment, even employment. ObEN envisions the same for its Personal AI — digital identities that can be used for various functions beyond fun and games, helping you do everything from virtual shopping (with real life delivery), managing your healthcare records, even coordinating travel.
Much like the OASIS safeguards and secures the information of the user and makes it possible for any industrious developer to create or port experiences to its virtual platform, ObEN uses a decentralized and immutable blockchain to secure our user’s PAI. As an early adopter of the Project PAI Blockchain, ObEN’s users can secure and authenticate their PAI on the blockchain. In this regard, current technology is one step ahead of what James Halliday created. The secure and decentralized nature of the blockchain means that no one company, even one as nefarious as IOI, can take over the network and exploit the personal data of users. The users themselves always retain control of their PAI and all the associated data.
In Ready Player One, in-game coins serve as the currency of the realm, allowing players to purchase anything from in-game items to real-world supplies that are delivered right to your door. While neither the book nor film dives too deeply into this economic system, it’s clear that these coins allow people to trade and consume all over the world. On the Project PAI Blockchain, PAI coin serve a similar purpose, allowing people to pay for applications and eventually even purchase real goods, perhaps even property. What makes this transaction system so fantastic is that just as Halliday programmed the OASIS to ensure the rules of conduct, smart contracts are in place on the blockchain to ensure the correct execution of PAI coin transactions without the need for third party control.
Finally there is the data, the traces of ourselves made digital by all the applications and websites we use. In the film, Anorak’s Almanac is rendered in glorious detail, cobbled together from pictures, videos, Halliday’s own writing, and data from the OASIS. In reality, records nearly as detailed as these exist on each one of us, centralized in corporate servers all over the world. But tied to a PAI, that data can be put to use for the individual user, not to fill us up to our eyeballs in advertising. Like the avatars in Ready Player One, your PAI can connect with data like your health, financial, even education records, building a complete picture of you that renders your PAI capable of performing tasks for you, even when you aren’t directly controlling it. How is that for the next phase in virtual technology?
For all the Ready Player One fans, nostalgia for the pop culture of the 90’s may be the film’s biggest draw. Yet we are so close to achieving some of the technology depicted, so close to even surpassing the functionality of Halliday’s avatars, it would be remiss not to look a little ahead. Using ObEN’s full-stack technology, users can already create their PAI from their mobile device with just a selfie and a short voice recording, and as more apps and users participate on the Project PAI blockchain ecosystem, the more robust and functional PAI will become. Halliday’s world of multi-functional avatars is much like what we envision for PAI, and you can bet an Easter egg that we will be there soon. Are you ready to be player one?
Join our Beta!
Want to be the first to experience Personal AI? ObEN will be releasing its first application on the Project PAI blockchain soon. Sign up at https://paiyo.com/ for a chance to be one of the first to create and use your own intelligent avatar and looks, sounds, and sings like you!
