Because you would feel face to face with that cartoon, even if it's an abstraction.

Videocalls only ever feel like they are screen to screen interactions, never face to face. There's just no way to provide that feeling through a 2D screen.

And having custom avatars that aren't derived from your real features can be fun and expressive and allow people to play with identity. VRChat is the perfect example of this.

> What’s the point of this, why would you want to see someone’s avatar over their real face and expressions?

It's pretty normal for people to adopt a persona online. With 3 billion gamers worldwide, I expect many of them would routinely want a stylistic avatar. Lets them be anonymous and be whoever they want.

You can still have a real body scan for your avatar, but the tech is still cooking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w52CziLgnAc

I have a feeling that avatar-based communication will as important of a milestone as the invention of phonecalls. It bridges a gap that's long been needed to be bridged: Digital interactions that feel like you are face to face with someone rather than screen to screen. That's a pretty fundamental part of the human social experience.

Full body avatars aren't a gimmick any more than phonecalls are.

You wouldn't really want to literally FaceTime in VR. They are just using the term FaceTime to mean a videocall, but the VR version - like VRChat.

I know Microsoft Teams does standard video conferencing with avatar options. Of course VTuber software all supports this too.

Yes, but as others have mentioned in this thread, a perfectly realistic virtual world has everything the real world has to offer - except actual death and the fear of death in certain extreme activities - and even that could still be rigged up to induce death if you wanted.

You can have plenty of struggle and challenge that you need to overcome in fully immersive virtual worlds, but you also get to reduce that if you want, and get to reap the rewards far more often, and the selection of rewards is far more varied.

> The fact of your utility is fake in VR.

If you have godmode and are just flicking your fingers to cast fireballs, then yes that's fake utility, but if you're a virtual performer, artist, architect, educator, developer - then your utility is real because it produces value that people accept in the real world and can help others.

I'd wager most people on this planet (of any age) want to live in a fantasy world.

It's pretty simple really. People want life to be as enjoyable and interesting as possible, and a fantasy would is simply always going to offer infinitely more opportunities for enjoyment and curiosity.

> I don't work with hardware AR or VR but I am sure the problems are not that complex that you make it out to be. I think the limited processing power is what is limiting it. Display technology has matured enough due to smartphones that they should not be the problem.

AR can't use any existing displays in a consumer viable form, and the optics stack has to be invented mostly from scratch. Optics in particular are very difficult because light is so finnicky and difficult to deal with. Then you have to attain a wide field of view, without distortion, somehow produce pure black with 100% transparency, work dynamically at many focal lengths, with HDR in several tens of thousands of nits (even the world's best HDR TV doesn't go beyond 2000), on a all-day or decently long battery life in a pair of glasses without dissipating too much heat, while stabilizing overlayed content with high precision including high precision environment mapping.

And we haven't even gotten into the main input method for AR, which is likely a brain-computer interface (EMG), software complexity and UX design being much harder due to 3D being a much wider canvas for interactions than a 2D screen.

I should have clarified consumer devices.

Though medical imagining, microprocessors, and datacenter networking are all a major part of AR glasses. For AR glasses to work well, they need cutting edge tech in each of those areas - Space travel, perhaps not.

AR is the hardest device engineering problem in human history. The complexity is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the invention of smartphones both from a hardware and software standpoint.

It's this complexity that leads to a very long road ahead for the industry, but if/when the tech gets to a certain point, I am confident it will also be the most transformational device in human history. High risk, high rewards.

I'd say you're a rarity. 99% of VR users use it for things other than flightsims.

Flightsims in VR are a very small niche.

VR/AR are converging. No reason to choose one or the other.

VR is selling pretty much as expected for an emerging industry. Nothing particularly bad or worrying going on here.

You often have a year or two with a decline (and this decline is arguably mostly attributed to the worldwide economy).

> What the about the things that were meant to catch on that never did?

Those things don't have much in common with VR/AR.

If you want to define VR/AR, they are whole mediums and computing platforms.

When was the last completely new medium or computing platform that failed to catch on?

That definition is important - it means they are general purpose devices for both entertainment/media and for practical use.

> VR has been around for a while now, if it was going to take off it would have by now.

VR products have had a shelf life of 6 1/2 years or 8 1/2 years if you want to count the couple of years that VR existed in the 1990s.

That's not long at all in the tech world. The average hardware shift takes 15 years of products being on shelves.

It's just how VR/AR goes. The tech is much more cutting edge/expensive than smartwatches/smartphones were at their hardest.

Eventually, we'll see far better products at 10% of the price, but it has to start somewhere.

Because they can't get user feedback, have a developer ecosystem, and see how their tech performs out in the wild (so they can refine it more accurately) if it's just kept in their labs.

They'd also have to wait 10-15 years. That's a lot of time to wait.

Who said they will stay goggles? This should eventually get into the stage of normal glasses for AR and curved sunglasses for VR.

I think a billion or so people will use VR in the next 20 years, and 4+ billion will use AR.

VR hasn't failed repeatedly. As someone with a good hook on the history of the tech, consumer VR has only ever failed once in the 1990s, and that wasn't even a serious attempt.

To put it into perspective, the entirety of 1990s consumer VR investment totals at best, one week of VR investment in the modern world. That's how little money and effort was put into VR back then, and it's because no large company actually released anything. It was only small companies like Forte. Nintendo/Sega/Atari released nothing in the end (Virtual Boy isn't VR so it doesn't count).

The market has responded differently this time. The investment is orders of magnitude higher, the sales are orders of magnitude higher, and the market has lasted thrice as long with more competitors jumping into the mix this year. On the technical side, some core problems with 1990s VR were fixed, and while a lot is left to fix, much of that is being worked on in R&D with solid results to show for so far.

> It wasn’t customers who said PCs & smartphones & the internet would fail - it was the entrenched business interests that didn’t get it. That’s not the case here.

It was both businesses falling behind the times and consumers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxcfgfxYJow

https://wayback.archive-it.org/5902/20150629134551/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf01313/patterns.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVyGb5ID90&t=228s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07xxyfLySA&t=761s

> They aren’t “visionaries” - they’re dilettantes with huge egos and way too much money to burn.

This is the classic response that even the people you would consider visionaries have to deal with. Though you would consider them visionaries with the benefit of hindsight.

> Everyone told these same “visionaries” that “smart speakers” were stupid & creepy too, and what happened? After billions wasted on marketing hype all the research recently concluded that yup, the market was right & nobody wants them either! They’re useless baubles.

There are hits and misses in tech, but point to me to a digital medium and/or fundamentally new computing platform (these are accurate descriptions of VR/AR) that failed to eventually take off. There are no examples of the latter, and I'm having trouble recalling any of the former, but maybe there's a few rare examples.

These same arguments could be made for computers and phones.

If your attitude prevailed for PCs/phones, then r/gadgets wouldn't exist, nor would the Internet or 99% of the modern world.

Visionaries move on regardless and create things that people don't know they want. Yes, people didn't know they wanted a computer or phone - most people can only think of faster horses, not what comes after the horse.

> I don’t have much reason to use it as a TV

The tech is just way too early. If it was just a pair of glasses today, your TV is still leagues better in resolution and clarity.

There will be a day where VR reaches parity with TVs and allows you to have any size you want in any space/position you want, complete with lighting control and the ability to share the screen with anyone across the planet as if they are sitting next to you - in a small form factor.

When that day comes, the reasons become a lot clearer. Though I think AR/VR will share this virtual display category as there are reasons why having a view of the real world is important at times.

There are already millions of VR players.

Actually it's pretty easy to make the argument that VR stands to be the highest bandwidth of communication information across all mediums, including real life.

Well, touch and smell and taste are technically a part of communication, so real life has VR beat there, but as far as our vision and hearing, VR can over time replicate every detail of real world communication - all our microexpressions - put that onto a perfectly realistic avatar of ourselves, or go Disney/anime style and have overly expressive avatars instead, which have an extra layer of communication that real life can't provide.

If you've watched VTubers or even just seen Disney movies, you know that there are things that can only be conveyed by such abstractions.

So VR will have as much visual/auditory expressability as the real world when going for full simulation of our real selves, or can offer extra expressability. And all other mediums exist in VR. I've shared photos, hyperlinks, videos, gifs, memes, and audio files in VR social spaces. You can also dial this up further and become the meme. I could have an avatar of the kool aid man.

> However, I think one of the biggest feelings of loss (besides lives) from the pandemic was that in-person connectivity. So given the option to socialize in-person, I agree that VR loses its footing a bit.

If we take a scale of 1-10, then letters would be a 1, texting would be a 2, phonecalls a 3, and videocalls a 4.

Everything before 5 would feel very much like a screen-based experience, devoid of the main social expectations of real life. Anything above 5 would feel very much like a real world experience.

If reality is a 10, then VR when it has matured 10-15 years from now will be a 9, which is close enough to make it invaluable.

> VR implies disconnecting personally in the same room, and being more online. And the way people are moving in online connectivity, it isn't VR. It's streaming, Discord servers, live chats, Twitch, messengers, etc. It seems a lot of people don't want to be so immersed into a game world they lose a lot of communication and interaction with other humans in the process.

This actually shows just how well-suited VR is.

Streaming, discord servers, live chats, twitch, messengers - how can all of this be improved? What is the ideal interface for all this social stuff? Meta has it right; it's VR where you go beyond chatting on a 2D screen and actually get to feel like you are face to face with other people.