#weekendreading

This weekend I gave myself a break from reading business books and read the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Have you have ever had a lovely dream and woke up and wanted to go back to the dream rather than wake up? Now imagine if you can construct a world of your dreams and using VR and haptic suits, your virtual, and real friends can join in and do all the things you can do in real life in the virtual world.

The risk is that if it comes very close to reality, people might want to stay on in the virtual world rather than face reality.

A situation like this is bound to happen in the future in the real world as well.

If Mark Zuckerberg has read this novel, it will justify his investments in VR. ( $2B purchase of Oculus).

To quote what he said ” In technology what we see over time is that, people are getting richer and richer tools, to express themselves and experience content on the internet …. there is always a more immersive and richer way you want to experience things and at the end of the day video is just a 2D format and I do not think that is the ultimate in human experience… Every 10 or 15 years there is a new major platform that comes along, I think it is going to be virtual reality along with augmented reality.”

You can hear this in this video https://youtu.be/VQaCv52DSnY?t=233

The book is about a treasure hunt inside a VR game. I know it sounds not so appealing, but the book is brilliantly written and is much better than the movie!

Watch the movie after you have read the book. There are references to classic video games, movies, songs, and TV shows from the 80s.

I have made a playlist of songs mentioned in the book in my apple music for fun.

This book is definitely for geeks and video game lovers – avoid watching the movie before you have read the book.