REALITY LEVEL

The second component of a virtual reality is the level of its realism. The greater the realism, the more objects within the reality relate in ways you expect Things in the reality have color, shadow, reflections, textures, tastes and sounds. They can pass through each other, around each other, and throw shadows.

Here's an example. There are a lot of ways to create a car. YOU can draw it as a box with a smaller box on top and four doughnuts for wheels. YOU can sketch it realistically, with the color, curves and reflections a real car would have. YOU can paint it in the superrealistic style of a modern artist, so real that the chrome seems to shine. YOU can take a photograph of a real car. Or you can build a real car.

Each one of these steps represents an increase in the realism of the car. As you go up the scale, the car gets more real all the time. Reflections and shadow, texture. tastes, sounds and weights can all exist at varying levels of realism in a virtual reality. All it takes is the right program and enough memory to implement it.

Creator is that program. Using a huge database of digital braindance recordings and three dimensional reality modeling routines, Creator sets the level of realism for the entire construct, choosing and creating images from the database. As part of the reality's ground rules, all objects contained with the reality will be of the same level of realism throughout. Creator has five levels of realism:

Simple: The object is like a cartoon. There are colors and blocky shapes, but no shading, texture or difference in tastes. All objects weigh the same, feel the same to the touch, make the same limited sounds ("bonk!" "beep!").

Contextual: The reality is like a very good video game. There is color and shading. Textures are limited, but soft things feel soft, hard things hard, rough things rough and smooth things smooth. Tastes are sweet, sour, salty and acidic. Things make sounds that are much like they do in real life (a car engine sounds pretty much like a car, a bird like a bird), but lack definition as they are created from digital sound recordings.

Fractal: The reality is very much like real life. Each object has a distinct taste, sound and texture. Colors are blended smoothly, and objects are shiny, dull, transparent and opaque. There is hot and cold, but not fine degrees of temperature. Distance and the relationships of other objects have effects on each other; planes pass through clouds and the air gets misty, the sun reflects off water, etc.

Photorealistic: The reality is much like a very, very good movie. Tastes are very close to what they are in real life, as are textures, sounds and colors. Light reflects naturally off of objects. Things relate almost exactly like they do in actuality; waves move and reflect light in interesting patterns, trees blow in the wind, dust rises off the furniture, things are hot and cold relative to each other.

Superrealistic: If there's a difference between this and the real thing, you can't tell.

Multiply the MU cost of the virtual construct by the multiplier for the level of reality to determine it's final MU cost.

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