I was in a game from the makers of Halo (I wasn’t playing it, I was IN it), at an arctic base filled with hundreds of people.

My assignment was to disrupt some sort of nuclear energy experiment they were conducting. I had multiple opportunities to do so, by sabotaging the centrifuges where they were refining uranium, or by waylaying the truck that delivered the finished product to the reactor. Unfortunately I missed both chances, and they were able to complete the experiment. The reactor glowed, and the “boss” burst forth from it - a giant, white-furred baboon. The thing went on a rampage, and I was barely able to avoid it as it careened across the snowy landscape, killing residents of the base left and right.

All this was like a mental preview of how far games have yet to go. This scene had the narrative and structure of a video game, and yet it WAS real life in all other respects. Not some low-res, two-dimensional image populated with a couple dozen people and controlled via a joystick, but oh-my-god-dive-outta-the-way-it’s-headed-right-for-us reality.

Too bad I won’t get to experience this during my lifetime. Here’s the technologies that would have to improve to match what I saw:

-Video. Not just higher-than-HDTV resolution, but stereoscopic as well. -Input. We’d need full-body, real-time motion capture. -Graphics. The full polygon output of a single game system today might have been able to render a single character in this world, but there were nearly a hundred of them. -Processing. Each of these characters was fully autonomous and capable of responding to spoken requests. Running all those AIs would bring any modern system to a crawl. -Physics. There were a whole lot of ragdolls flying around when that baboon let loose. But there’s promise in this area: I bet the Ageia PhysX card coming out this fall could have done it.