Only a little bit more time before the first primitive holodecks are created

Star Trek fan? Of course you are. And every Star Trek fan has thought before about what it would mean to have a holodeck. Well, here's something called the ICube by IDEO labs that resembles a holodeck to a certain extent:


Amazing 3D immersion technology from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

You can see straight away that the biggest disadvantage to this is that the person using it isn't capable of going anywhere, as there are walls around him and moving just a metre or so would cause him to bump into them. How to fix that? Easy, use something like this omni-directional treadmill:



Now you can move just about everywhere...one person can, at least. Now, the most impressive part about a holodeck is the extreme realism, not just in the graphics but also the fact that characters inside the holodeck look and act just like real people, and at the moment we're not even close to creating AI that convincing. However, there are some much more basic programs used on the holodeck for other tasks such as training personnel - basic shooting and fighting games, exercise and so on, and that should be easy enough to recreate. A certain amount of limited AI (the kind you find in RPGs) would be possible too. Besides games though this could also have a lot of other realistic applications - conference calls, teaching classes, military training, sports training, etc.