The military loves its technology and being the military they get to play with all the new tech goodies first. For some time now they have been using that access to cutting edge technology to create some pretty realistic virtual reality worlds for their soldiers to train in.

The only problem is that like the rest of us who get to play the public versions of those first person shooters in virtual worlds getting blown up or shot doesn’t really hurt all that much. This is something that the Army wants to change – and soon.

To help move that idea along the Army has put out a request for some technology that will “create an impulse force that simulates the feel of debris … or bullets flying“; or getting blown up by an bomb perhaps.

The technical term for the request is actually “Haptic Feedback for a Virtual Explosion” with the idea being to make training exercises as realistic as technologically possible so that soldiers will have a better idea of what the reality of warfare is like, short of actually getting shot or blown up.

This idea is a lead up for the real military wet-dream – fighting with fake humans that feels real or in more techie terms “tactile interaction with three dimensional interactive holograms“.

via io9

The Army wants some realistic virtual reality pain for training soldiers is a post from: The Inquisitr

However this wasn’t a theft that happened on a street corner or schoolyard. This was a theft in a virtual world and the goods don’t even exist outside of this virtual world they were a part of. As for the Japanese woman in jail for murder well that to only happened in a virtual world where she got pissed that her virtual husband had virtually divorced her so she virtually murdered him.

WTF is going on here. It’s bad enough that parents are being held accountable for the actions of their children in a real world where any real control they have over their children has been legislatively; or socially, been taken away from them. Now we are suggesting that any actions taking place in a make believe world are chargeable offences in the real world. I totally get how things like cyberstalking or cyber bullying are things that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law but there is a big difference here between the two. With things like cyberstalking the Internet is the intermeditary but with the first cases it is all imaginary – it has no validity in the real world.

What’s next – being charged for following someone too often in Second Life or seeing jail time for virtually  handling virtually stolen goods in some other virtual world? The idea that what we do when we step foot in a virtual world and has absolutely nothing to do with our real world can have some sort of legal ramifications in our real world is incredulous. As Mathew Ingram asked in his post about this today

The fascinating thing with virtual theft and other “crimes,” of course, is that there are so many different ways of stealing money and property and engaging in all sorts of other bad behaviour inside Second Life or some other virtual world. You can hack the game to generate money or credits, you can run scripts that copy artefacts and property (which you can then sell inside the game), and you can sell the money you got illegally to noobs and then virtually mug them to take it back inside the game. The possibilities are endless. Should they all be real-world crimes too?

What will we see next – ads for lawyers specializing in virtual reality law?

Don’t Mind The Virtual Gun I’m Pointing At Your Virtual Head is a post from: The Inquisitr