Now, this is still very, VERY alpha technology that is currently on display at SIGGRAPH, which is being held in New Orleans! Finally, a good story out of the Big Easy, it's been just to long.
Now SIGGRAPH is like crack for futurist like myself, where we get to see the next big thing before it's either used by the military for a weapon or by society for porn. If you take offense at the statement, take a gander of the implementation of technology through out humanity's evolution.
So back to the my outrageous statement that mankind has developed the technology for a holodeck.
First thing you need for a holodeck is virtual reality that is beyond anything else we have had before. This is where INRIA and Grenoble Universities in France comes in. While the Bush Administration was busy hating on the Garden of Europe, the French have been developing a new generation of VR that will blow your mind.
It's called the Virtualization Gate.
http://grimage.inrialpes.fr/...
Going from polygon based environments to a fractal based rendering would have been a big enough jump, but those crazy Frenchies brought a fully-interactive tracking interface to New Orleans!
As you can see in the video, the VR environment is now interactive to the full range of movements of the user. This is best shown by the user kicking over the vases in real life and the same physics being applied in the VR realm.
But one still cannot feel, the physical sensation of kicking over the vase.
This is where the Japanese come in, and if you are looking for the crazy tech that would even blow William Gibson's lid, you need todrop in on the University of Toyko.
http://www.alab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/...
Here is what they have made:
Touchable Holography
You read that right, TOUCHABLE HOLOGRAPHY. I prefer the term force-feedback virtual reality.
So what you do is is apply touchable holography to create force-feedback in a Virtualization Gate environment to create a total physical emersion for the user from their relative point of view.
Or, a Holodeck.
America should get on that, because that is what America does best. We see the world and all of its ideas and technology and recombine it into fantastical products that we create with our industrial might and sell around the world.
Or we use to, before we became a nation dependent on financial services to generate wealth.
I say we got back to selling the world boxes labeled, "Made in the USA."
Especially if we start slinging holodecks.
Update: And oh, if you don't want to wear the VR helmet, there is always the enhanced reality goggles!
In the future this will be refracted into the cornea of the eye using tracking by the gateway system creating an peripheral free experience.
And that will happen sooner than you think.