re: Pain, this system will require it.
First, pain is part of the feedback system that tells our body we are doing something wrong, and as such is an integral way our brains work to move our bodies appropriately. Without pain we can’t tell when our arm is extended too far. That’s not, per se, a problem in the virtual world since we can over-extend a virtual arm all we want with no ill effects, but it will make control very difficult to achieve since all the boundaries our brain is familiar with have now vanished.
Second, pain is also part and parcel to other sensory information that we want in this system. I want to feel the warmth of a fireplace, or the chill of standing in the snow. If I’m picking up an item from a table, I want to be able to distinguish by feel if it’s a sphere or a cube. Take that fireplace warmth to the extreme though, and I feel the pain of burning; the chill of snow in the extreme is now the sting of freezing. Take the “edge detection” of feeling a cube vs a sphere to the extreme, and I now feel the slice of a blade.
But at the end of the day, I’m with . We won’t see any of this in any of our lifetimes. For all the speed of other technological advances, human-machine interfaces are surprisingly slow-moving in advancement. The keyboard is still the primary means of input to machines these days, and it’s over 75 years old. Even touchscreens still try to emulate keyboards for textual input. Speech input is relegated to narrow niche products for folks with disabilities. Eye tracking is still getting off the ground, and that’s just the input side of things. Outputs are limited to two of our 5 senses. Full immersion VR won’t be very immersive if we can’t smell the forest we’re seeing around us.
No, this level of technology won’t be around for a hundred years at minimum. Probably further out than that.