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Can sci-fi predict our future? Julia Hardy looks at the games that imagine a new tomorrow, and speaks to the experts to find out if fantasy could eventually become reality.

Julia ventures into the many future worlds that video games have predicted for humanity – from sci-fi dystopias and ruined remnants of our contemporary civilisations, to more optimistic and hopeful scenarios, where people benefit from technological advances and augmentations, and even invite A.I. assistants into our homes.

Speaking to games journalists Tamoor Hussain and Alice Bell, Julia discovers how games developers have mined the rich resource of a sci-fi future for inspiration. She meets Anthony Steed, Professor in Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics at UCL, to determine just how likely these futures could be. Will androids walk among us, blending into the crowds of any modern metropolis? Will schools use VR for time-travelling history lessons? Will we all be wearing full-body exoskeletons to mimic 'real life' touch sensations when we play games?

Julia also meets the cast of Steven Spielberg’s new movie Ready Player One, as well as the director himself, to talk about their favourite future-set video games. She finds out if the massive online virtual reality world the film is set in, The OASIS, is something they can imagine happening in the near future. After all, gamers already play online for millions of hours per year – what’s really stopping us from spending even more time interacting in a digital space, rather than a physical one?

Is it all doom and gloom? Or will the next technological age enrich humankind, and the human condition? As Julia quickly realises: there’s a lot more to virtual reality and advanced A.I. than simple fun and games.