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It's funny, "people" said that the Internet would reduce the use of paper. I'm fairly certain that it hasn't reduced anything; I think a good argument could be made to show that paperwork has increased.
Besides, any serious photographer knows that the art of photography died when collodian went out of style.
Really I think those who would replace tabletop rpgs with virtual reality are, for the most part, those who have already replaced them with video games. I don't play tabletop rpgs for any reasons that VR could actually improve on, so there would be no reason to replace one activity with the other.
My old group is spread all over the place. If technology could let use get together around a virtual tabletop (without the currently large price tag) we probably would.
Eventually, virtual conferencing technology (which is progressing for other reasons) will be good enough to do that. Then someone will write a dice app to let the users throw virtual dice. Then someone will add an editable map with virtual minis. Then someone will add some code to attach stats to the minis. Then someone will add an initiative and movement tracker. Before long, the computer will be doing a lot of the grunt work without the players really noticing the transition. All this is easily doable within 20 years, and maybe within 10.
Of course, none of this replaces the DM or the rules of the game and it seems very likely that we'll use the new technology to play the same old games (not that there won't be new ones too).
Um, MagiMaster... all that stuff is already available. Stuff like MapTool and the like have already been around for a while, I'm not sure exactly how long, but a few years at least.
I thought it would have been really interesting if WOTC simply adopted the Pathfinder OGL and used it for their campaign settings. But, really, what are the chances of that?
Ok, I know things called virtual tabletops exist, but the experience is no where close to the real thing. That difference will diminish as time goes on.
I meant a virtual table more literally, as in you can look around and see the other connected people standing/sitting around a virtual table. (This technology is being developed for multiple uses, so there's nothing to suggest it won't continue to improve.)
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Roughly twelve years ago, on a pre-WWW system called "usenet" I was a member of the amateur photography newsgroup. At that time digital cameras were mere toys being purchased by housewives to snap blurry photos of their children at soccer games.
Hardly.
Twelve years ago the Nikon D1 had been around for about a year, and was the tool of choice for sports and news photography. And this was the second generation of digital cameras - the original Kodak DCS cameras (based on Nikon or Canon film bodies) had first come to market almost a decade earlier, in 1991.
By the turn of the century the writing was clearly on the wall. By that time I was on my second digital camera - a 3MP Canon PowerShot G1 (my first was an Agfa with VGA (640x480) resolution that I got in a give-away promotion). Canon released the first 'cheap' DSLR - the EOS D30 - in 2000, and Nikon followed up with the D100 in 2001. And even before DSLRs took over digital imaging it was obvious where the world was going - Nikon had been selling film scanners into the amateur market throughout the 90s, and various image editing programs were fighting over the territory thad Adobe eventually claimed (Photoshop CS1 was released in 2003).