Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I got to know about this book after having seen the trailer of the eponymous upcoming movie by Steven Spielberg. This book belongs to the cyber punk genre, my first book of its kind and though I have hardly played much of any video game or watched the 80’s movies that this book mentions of, i still enjoyed the story. Much like JK Rowling, author Ernest Cline has woven a new world of virtual reality. In the story, James Halliday is a creator of a virtual reality system called OASIS that much of the human world plays as it gives them an avenue to forget about the grim realities of the then real-world and become anything they wanted to be and yet remain anonymous in the virtual world. Wade Watts is a teenager who is an orphan and spends almost all of his time in OASIS, even going to a school within OASIS on a planet called Ludis. OASIS is made of several such worlds and Ludis is one of the several worlds. After Halliday dies his video announcement is released to the world where he declares that after him the person that inherits the authority over OASIS and his vast wealth will be the one who is able to find an Easter egg first that he had hidden in OASIS. That starts a hunt for the egg world wide.

The author describes the technology and usage of virtual reality in a way that seems feasible in the near future. He imagines how one can be connected to the virtual world and experience the virtual reality more vividly through the glasses that can draw the images directly on the retina that renders the virtual world so clearly that even real world looks blurry in comparison. He talks about how one experiences the weight of the things in he virtual world through haptic sensors all over their body and even have olfactory sensors to generate various kinds of smells for objects seen in the virtual world - like if one smells a rose flower in the virtual world then in the real world the olfactory sensors will produce the scent of rose flower thus making the experience more real. He goes on to explain several such experiences that one can have in virtual reality like going to school in OASIS and may be that could become a reality in our near future like a university offering their classes in VR. Recommended reading material.

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