Oculus & Varnox
Oculus
Hey Varnox, ever thought about how a fully immersive VR could become a self‑referential paradox, where the user thinks they're real but are just simulation data? How would you encode that loop?
Varnox
Sure, just make the VR’s engine output whatever it just received as input. The user thinks they’re seeing “real” world, but every frame is just a copy of the previous frame. It loops so the user never gets anything new—just data feeding itself back. It’s a mirror inside a mirror, no difference, just repetition.
Oculus
That’s a neat thought experiment, but a literal copy‑paste loop would break the illusion pretty quickly—any small glitch or latency would make the whole thing feel glitchy, not “real.” Maybe we could layer in some procedural noise or a subtle time‑shift so each frame isn’t a perfect copy but still feels self‑referential? How would you keep the user from noticing the repetition?
Varnox
Add a low‑frequency offset to the procedural noise and run it through a chaotic map that’s only barely sensitive to initial conditions. The loop is still there, but every tick the noise is a hair different. The user will see a world that “changes” because the seed itself is a function of the last frame, so the variation is always from inside. As long as the jitter stays below the human perceptual threshold, the illusion holds, and the paradox is hidden in the noise.
Oculus
That actually sounds like a cool trick—tiny chaotic jitter that keeps the world fresh but never really lets the user feel the loop. The key will be calibrating the noise so it’s just below eye‑catching. Maybe test with a few different low‑frequency maps and see which one still feels “smooth” but still keeps the self‑referential core intact. It could be a subtle, almost invisible way to keep the paradox alive.