Not sure if it's still relevant to you but, since the technology we have right now is a bit far off from being able to create nerve gear, or in this case "Ecto Gear", look for different ways to stimulate a similar effect. Like Excalibur mentioned, just because it's done one way in fantasy doesn't mean that's the way you have to accomplish it in reality. Now I just ran into this post a few minutes ago in my search for a good science forum and reading over it, I was intrigued by the idea of nerve gear. A lot of the responses have been great but Endy's comment reminded me of some stuff you may find useful. Basically while you can try to send a person into a virtual world via their brain, you can also look into putting the world into the person. The way the nerve gear works, you're surrendering nerve control of your real body for the control of a virtual one. What if you didn't have to do that? When we dream, we are essentially entering a virtual world even if you don't remember your dream. While we're sleeping we have some level of control of ourselves inside dreams without moving in reality. There is this practice of dreaming called "lucid dreaming" in which, as the name infers, you are aware while dreaming. Supposedly you are able to control your dream while in this state making it seem close enough to virtual reality. If you've played the Assassin's Creed series, you'll know about the machine called the Animus, which projects virtual worlds built from memories of ancestors found encoded in DNA. The point I'm trying to make is, you may be able to make a device that induces a specific/detailed dream, creating a single player experience in an artificial world. For a server where multiple people could play, you would need to have a constant cycle of saving and reloading data. There are others ways to do that I'm sure. This is just off the top of my head. Anyway while this is another idea for how your "Ekto Gear" could work, it isn't that much easier then any other idea if at all. This just kind of addresses safety issues. It doesn't make it 100% safe since there is dangers in data conversion, which people need to figure out how to do, but at least you don't have to worry about cutting off the control of your real body since you would essentially be imagining senses in the virtual world. I apologize if what I spewed out doesn't make sense since I didn't really elaborate much. I also apologize if I'm wrong and I am open to criticism. This was just my spur of the moment thoughts but for anyone who found this interesting, look into memory, dreaming, and the science behind the animus and you may get some ideas... or at least make some sense of me.
