Cyberspace: Difference between revisions

Cyberspace just puts a modern spin on the idea.

One curious alternative idea that seems to infest many cyberspaces is travel time... [[The Metaverse]] of ''[[Snow Crash]]'' has people ''walking to the shops on [[The Internet]]''. This could be seen as the illogical conclusion to the increasingly graphical user interface design evolution from the concise but user-unfriendly command line to drag-and-drop windows and pointers and presumably to the final stages where [[Extreme Graphical Representation|your avatar crumples up your virtual document and walks over to the virtual bin with it]]. People in the future clearly have a phenomenal amount of patience with their user interfaces. Essentially, Cyberspace [[Stylistic Suck|is stylized into]] a simulation that's [[Lotus Eater Machine|virtually indistinguishable from real life]], and less of a recreational pastime or tool.

** It also notes how inconvenient the general interface is; Hiro works in Flatspace (a plain 2D GUI like the one that you are probably using right now) when he gets serious.

* [[Tad Williams]]' ''[[Otherland]]'' books successfully combine Sci-Fi and Fantasy tropes by being set [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]], and creating Fantasy environments within the bounds of cyberspace. It's worth mentioning that travel time is normally nearly instantaneous, but specific virtual environments can be configured to simulate realistic movement, and this is considered something of a cachet of the eccentric and well-off.

* [[Sergey Lukyanenko]]'s ''Labyrinth of Reflections'' series revolves around "the Deep", a [[Cyberspace]] that allows full immersion through a series of hypnotic images that each user is subjected to before going online. The images put the user in a sort of trance where their brain "fixes" the imperfect virtual reality of the Deep by perceiving it as a photo-realistic space, allowing for full immersion. [[Normal People]] can't leave the trance on their own but some (aptly dubbed "Divers") can and their primary job is finding people who are stuck in [[Cyberspace]] and bail them out before they die of dehydration in [[Real Life]].

* The show ''[[Andromeda]]'', gives you brightly-lighted tubes, electronic sounds, all sorts of crap zooming around, and a Godzilla-sized avatar.

* ''[[Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad]]'' (based on a show called Gridman by [[Ultraman|Tsuburaya Productions]]) centered around this.

** The Matrix of "The Deadly Assassin" is unique in that it's not meant for a living person to go into AT ALL. It's basically a library of dead Time Lords' neural impulses, which are used to forecast future events and figure out how to deal with them. It only serves the "alternate dimension" function because the Master has tampered with it big-time.

* ''[[VR Troopers]]'' featured virtual reality as an [[Alternate Universe]], so things created in VR (such as [[Mecha Mooks]], [[One-Winged Angel|supervillain forms]], and a [[Monster of the Week]] for every occasion) could be brought into reality. "Virtual Reality" tends to resemble the [[BBC Quarry]] in most episodes.

[[Category:The Internet]]

[[Category:Cyberspace]]