Okay, maybe not, but Mitch Kapor, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and generally near-prescient entrepreneur is sending the resources of Kapor Enterprises in that direction.
Kapor currently serves as the Chairman of the Board for Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. One of the biggest complaints about virtual worlds--and we'll skip the tired flying penis jokes--is that it's hard to navigate in a 3D environment using a mouse and keyboard. His solution is to use a 3D camera to register movement and let users ride their avatars as if they were riding Segways.
Video of developer Phillipe Bossut flapping his hands to fly after the jump.
Your weekly dose of science news, The Monitor, once again raises its ugly head. (No wait, that's just the Paul Janka lookalike in our second segment. Or the Predator in our third. Hey, it's that kind of week.)
In this episode: 3 new dinosaurs discovered (only 2 of which are cool), what hotornot.com tells us about the psychology of love, a disturbing map of human impact on the world's oceans, and a "virtual patient" that looks like Operation on steroids.
Lucky for us, Discover Magazine and be-dreadlocked VR-guru Jaron Lanier are happy to answer with a "probably not."
The column itself is actually a thoughtful dive into the parameters of virtual-reality research and the limits of human perception. The Matrix inevitably gets name-dropped, and there's some heady exploration into who might be at the hands of our impossibly complex simulation, if, in fact, life IS a complete VR-simulation.
For the record, I want to say that on January 11, 2008, at 3:22 AM, clutching my twenty-sided die, I invented it--a walkable metaverse.
If you've read even this far you've probably been fantasizing about the holodeck ever since your pasty flesh and velvet cloak first consigned your little peter to a decade of singlehanded abuse. Well, now you can have it. The technology, at least, exists. And soon God (Johnny Lee) is going to make it for you. We'll just have to ask nicely. I'm going to start by writing him a letter asking him to be my new dad. Admittedly they'll have to steal Seadragon from MicroSoft, but whoever makes it--and it will be made--is in for a Brave New World.
Screw CES: Force-feedback vests and tableputers are fine and all, but Carnegie Mellon researcher Johnny Lee has them all beat with his homemade, Wii-based virtual reality headtracking system. Are you ready for a mind explosion?
Lucky for us, Discover Magazine and be-dreadlocked 
We'll just have to ask nicely. I'm going to start by writing him a letter asking him to be my new dad. Admittedly they'll have to steal Seadragon from MicroSoft, but whoever makes it--and it will be made--is in for a Brave New World.
