Don't forget that there are a billion headphones users, nearly 1.5 billion PC users, and 4-5 billion smartphones users.

Headphones are pretty much always single-user devices, PCs are very usually single-user devices, and smartphones are a bit of both, but people are very protective about their privacy when it comes to their phones and handing it off to someone else, so they might just show someone the screen and that's about as far as that goes.

That's a lot of devices being used for single user experiences. VR can fit into that category just fine and still make it big.

Manipulating 3D data on a 2D screen can both work well and not work well; depends on the activity in question. People don't really have an issue creating/showing data through statistics and charts on a 2D screen, but there's a lot of struggle in both learning and ultimately using 3D modelling software because a mouse and keyboard or touchscreen isn't the most sufficient or natural interface there.

Perhaps one of the biggest usecases of 2D screens is communication. If we talk about videocalls in particular, then that is a huge step-back from how humans evolved to communicate, as there is no spatial context, it happens out of scale, and it happens in 2D - altogether creating this very unnatural result that we put up with because it's the best we have but would be tossed aside for something better. This is perhaps the biggest potential of VR - a new communications medium, enabling people to connect face to face instead of screen to screen.

VR always feels like you are face to face. That's the entire effect it provides.

It's just that you are face to face with abstractions - low-resolution, low-fidelity avatars that are kind of janky.

At least with today's tech.

If it felt like you were in a videogame lobby, what would the point of VR be? I could get that feeling just by playing Call of Duty on console.

> FaceTime is great because anyone with an iPhone can do it.

That might be the case, but no one thinks FaceTime is remotely close to being with someone in person. It feels like you are behind a screen talking to another person inside a small screen, all of it being 2D.

The point of VR communication is that it would feel like you are face to face with the person. I would never recommend anyone who isn't rich to buy a $3000 device, but I would recommend average people to buy the mature version of this for $500 in 10 years or so.

Avatars are critically important to VR/AR if it's to ever gain mass adoption. Certain styles can very much suck, as Meta has displayed with their Horizon avatars, but getting it right is important.

It would probably be difficult to fit in with family, but I think many gamers with other gamer friends would probably find it fine.

Your comment just goes to show though that the video I linked is critically important for true mass adoption of VR/AR communication - having a photorealistic scan of yourself will be important in many contexts.

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.