Shared Reality

Futuristic tech creating a closer world

Feb 02, 2024

Watching Super Bowl LVI in shared reality experience (original photo by John Coon)

Imagine walking the sidelines at the Super Bowl.

A deafening roar from surrounding fans fills your ears as a quarterback barks out signals and the ball snaps. Two lines violently collide as the quarterback backpedals and uncorks a perfect spiral to a receiver streaking downfield toward the end zone. Can you feel adrenaline surging through your body as you take in one of the world's biggest sporting events from the best seat in the house?

Now imagine enjoying this experience hundreds or thousands of miles away without ever setting foot in the actual stadium. That's the nature of a shared reality Cosm is creating with cutting-edge technology.

We aren’t talking about simple virtual reality.

This is an experience only a couple steps removed from a Star Trek style holodeck simulation.

Real World Holodeck

During the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Cosm invited me to tour their experience center in Salt Lake City. I spent approximately 90 minutes seeing what they described as shared reality for the first time.

Cosm’s experience theater is a 65-foot diameter 8K+ LED dome. (Resolution can go as high as 24k). Inside the dome, you are surrounded on three sides by vivid imagery that feels incredibly realistic and is totally immersive. You truly feel like you’re traveling the world without ever leaving the room.

The experience theater tour included so many cool destinations:

Standing among tulip fields in the Netherlands.
Watching a sunset on a beach in Spain.
Touring the Sistine Chapel.
Looking down on Earth from the International Space Station.
Watching the Super Bowl from the sidelines.
Watching an NBA game courtside.

The immersive sights, sounds, and music made me feel as if I spent weeks racking up frequent flyer miles on globe-trotting adventures. Each destination seemed so real and tangible. You felt like you could reach out and pluck a tulip with your hand or dip your toes into the surf on the beach. Amazing and exciting doesn’t begin to describe the entire experience.

Cosm plans to introduce this shared reality experience to Los Angeles and Dallas in 2024. Both cities will soon house fully functioning domes that will host numerous fun shared reality events in the near future.

Art Influences Life

Talking to creators behind Cosm’s shared reality technology, I found they drew inspiration from science fiction stories they grew up reading and watching. These are people who want to own a real lightsaber or phaser. They want to hang out on a real holodeck or starship. Developing this cutting-edge technology is an outgrowth of a love of stories and characters that open minds to greater possibilities.

I, too, am influenced by sci-fi stories I loved as a child as I create my own stories within the genre. I enjoyed Cosm’s shared reality experience, in part, because it shares a few parallels to a fictional alien technology I dreamed up that plays a critical role in Dark Metamorphosis — the second novel in my Alien People Chronicles series.

Within the pages of Dark Metamorphosis, Calandra is introduced to a virtual imaging chamber. A virtual imaging chamber bears a half-cylinder shape and is tall enough and wide enough to admit one adult human. Narrow vertical lights as long and wide as a human foreman line the walls from floor to ceiling. When the chamber is activated, it sends a signal to a contact block in another location. The contact block generates an image of a person inside the chamber who can be seen and heard by anyone near the block. The chamber recreates the destination within the chamber. In this way, two people can see and speak with one another as if they are in the same room even while hundreds or thousands of miles apart.

I love seeing advances in real-life technology inspired by science fiction. I hope one day my own stories inspire similar future advances in the minds of readers who grow to love the fictional worlds I create.