Steve Hoffman argues the brain already generates VR through dreams and hallucinations. By stimulating it with algorithms, we could create internal AR/VR without headsets. He envisions brains linked to the internet, letting humans control robots on other planets or experience dragonfly vision through external sensors.
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The next thing that is really interesting is, you know, everybody's talking about augmented reality and VR right now. In the future, our minds are actually much more powerful than any VR or AR device. So, imagine, I want you to think about this. When you dream, when you're in a dream, It's like virtual reality. You know, I had some crazy dreams last night. I do every night. And, you know, those dreams are real to us. And we see everything, we touch, we can even feel, because our mind can create this total experience. If you've taken any drugs, like LSD, suddenly the— it becomes real, right? Our minds are actually doing AR or VR. Right? Putting dragons in the room, and creating, like, all this different— we're able to— the point is, we are able to do that with our brains as they exist right now. So there's no need for external hardware. Once we tap into the brain, there is the potential that our minds itself can actually create overlays of AR and VR. If we have algorithms that stimulate the right things, and give it the right data, We could literally see a screen pop up. We call it hallucinating, right? But these would be controlled hallucinations run by algorithms that would give us everything AR would without any glasses, without any contact lenses. That is an idea I thought would be very interesting to explore, because our brains are now capable of doing it. How do we get them to do it? How do we control it? That's a great idea. That is the question. But you can imagine us entering entirely living in the real world as we do now, and also living in this virtual world where they are combined in a— right inside our minds. Now, our minds are so amazing, because did you know when you are looking at me now, when you look at me now, That what you are seeing is not really me. Now, what you are— your eyes are not— your brain, it's not like a video camera. You're not getting a video feed. What you are doing is you are getting a sense of the room and your brain is recreating it in your head. So even the reality— and if you read enough books on the brain, which I've read Way too many. You will understand that our minds are actually creating reality. So, what a very interesting experiment that they've done is, number one, we all have a blind spot in our eye. That center of our eye, that center, there's a blind spot right in the middle. But our brains actually fill that in. So, like, none of us see a hole as we look around, but that hole is actually there. Our brains are just filling it in with what it thinks should be there by our own algorithms of what we expect to be there. When you— you know magicians who can trick you? They have a ball and all of a sudden appears a ball. You're like, how did that happen? Well, they do it by not— because your brain is— your eyes don't see what's really there. Your eyes see what your brain tells them is there. So if you think a ball is here or not here, your brain will erase it. Your brain does this all the time. It actually puts stuff where it isn't and removes stuff. This AR and VR stuff is happening every single day of your life. So when you walk around, you're actually— your brain is creating a reality. And a lot of times, you know, you'll look and you'll see something, and then you'll look again and it'll be a little different, the color or something else. It's because your brain is always changing it based on what it expects to see. And that's because it's slow. Things are slow. Getting information in and out is slow. And your brain needs to react quickly. And it requires a lot of processing power. So your brain is actually fudging it to make— vision requires a lot more processing power than audio, than hearing. So your brain, like, what you hear is closer to reality than what you see. Because your brain is filling in all the gaps between what is there in reality and what your brain expects to be there. So here's another idea I was thinking about, is that when our brains are connected to the internet, our physical bodies become less important. Now, think about that. If our brains are connected to the internet, and if our brains are all connected, all of us connected, I could literally go into your head and see through your eyes. So all of a sudden, for a day, a lot of us, because you're entrepreneurs, think it would be cool to go inside Elon Musk's head for a day and walk around. Well, Elon Musk may allow people to get that feed. And literally live through what he sees. Now, it wouldn't just apply to other human beings. It could also apply to robots. So literally, I think Elon Musk's going to have a hard time colonizing Mars. It's a much harder problem. I mean, if you read a lot of books on it, and I know he has, it's really hard to get humans living on Mars and surviving. But what we will have in the near future are robots that live on Mars. And these robots will have sensors. They can touch the soil. The toxic Martian atmosphere won't affect them. They can hear things. They can talk. They can do all these things. If we connect our brains directly to the internet, we could go off and explore these other planets through these surrogate bodies. Through these robots. So you could be exploring other bodies, and these bodies, the beauty— now this is where it gets really amazing. These bodies, they don't have to be like the— they aren't limited to what the human body is. We have 5 senses, right? And they're pretty limited. These guys, you could— this could be a dragonfly, right? You could tap into a dragonfly and be flying through— Flowers or a bee pollinating all the flowers. And it could be a robotic bee, and it could have different senses than you ever imagined. Like when you go into a sweet-smelling flower like that one, it could actually create these new feelings and sensations that you would be transmitted to your brain that you had never experienced before, because the sensors in it are different than the sensors we have. And our brain would start to interpret them. So they've done many scientific experiments where people who lost their arms, they would put an artificial limb on them, but the people would feel pain in their limb. Like, your arm is gone, but they still feel pain. How is that possible? That is because the old arm that they had in their body Was mapped into the brain. Was literally— your brain— your body just happens to be the way it is. We could be a totally different type of organism, and our brain would adapt and map those sensations. So what they did was they would actually show the person in a mirror as if they had an arm, and they would touch that arm— And then the person would start to feel stuff in an arm that didn't exist. So people who had lost their arm, when the vision, the visual, they see something is touching their arm, they start to feel it even though nothing is touching their arm. The arm is artificial. They have done these experiments. I saw them at MIT and other universities where they give people through VR a The body of a doll. And they start playing with the doll, and because it feels— they're being told it's their own body, within a very short time, a matter of minutes, they start to feel things. Because first they start touching their real leg, and they start touching the doll's leg, right? And then all of a sudden they feel like the doll's leg is their leg. And then if they come with scissors to cut it off, people freak out. They're like, no! Because it's their— in their mind, it's their real leg, even though consciously they know it's not their real leg. It's just an artificially created thing. What I'm saying is the same science that they are doing in the labs now, when we start to get feeds from other machines, other inputs, sensors that we don't have, things— imagine our taste, right? We can only taste so many flavors, but we will be able to create sensors in the future, sensors that can taste a huge variety of different things that are out of our range. We will be able to create sensors that can hear things that are out of our hearing range, like dogs. You know, they can hear stuff we can't. Dogs also can smell a huge range of smells that we can't smell. In the future, by connecting these things directly into our brain, we will be able to experience a life and sensations that we never even imagined possible. We'll become much more than human, or it'll be— we will transform ourselves so that the reality we're living in is much richer and deeper than it is now. I hope I'm giving you some ideas for startups. Some of you are thinking, ah, well, this might be good.
