The audio latency is better. You're not sending or receiving HD video so your connection is less loaded and the audio doesn't ever have to be delayed to synchronize with video. And VR devices are better optimized for low latency than your average system. Visual cues for turn taking while speaking work better, as you mentioned. Spatial audio is awesome for locating speakers and differentiating multiple speakers at once. Hand gestures work better; you can actually point at things in a shared 3D space.

People just won’t put on world-occluding headsets to talk to cartoons, end of the day. Only in bubble-land does this pass the smell test imo.

I remember swearing up and down that I didn't need a phone I could carry everywhere with me. This was in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

What communication was so important that it couldn't wait until I was home, next to my land line and answering machine?

Have you seen the cellphones of the late 1980s? https://techcentral.co.za/the-cellphones-of-the-1980s/191544...

While phones now are "simple, unobtrusive and easy to position and use contextually", they certainly weren't then.

And they weren’t as popular then. They also were unobtrusive in the ways that matter - you could walk around and talk while doing other things. David Foster Wallace has a whole thing on this in IJ that really captures it well, where even corded phones are really better than we give credit because they give you freedom and privacy. You can do chores, look in the mirror, and signal to people in the room all while talking.

If anything I think things move more towards Slack Huddle where you retain your freedom of movement in favor of just voice + screen. It’s an anachronistic pov to try and force real world into virtual so literally.

It’s just a very SV thing to ignore all the social and emotional needs and just look at “oh it’s higher fidelity” or whatever. If it was all about immersion people would carry iPads around, but they don’t.

The difference in asking someone to give 10% of their vision to a TV or phone screen that can be turned away from with 0 effort, vs giving 100% of their vision, with considerable effort to enter and leave, is so under appreciated.

I don't think you've spent enough time learning about the technology or the goals of its proponents to argue against it. You're starting to veer off into strawman territory. Most VR proponents see two big use cases: immersive entertainment and augmented reality.

Immersive entertainment will demand 100% of your attention but you will want to give it 100% because there is no other way to have such a deep experience otherwise. Watching a movie or playing a game on a screen is fine but it doesn't give you the same visceral reactions that you have with even the simplest VR experiences like standing on a ledge 10 stories up or killing an NPC in melee combat. Both feel real and the second one can be quite disturbing the first time you do it even though the graphics are still low res. I've never experienced anything that even came close through a normal screen

Augmented reality will be unobtrusive and only demand part of your attention. It will be additive to the world around you and it will replace the phone in your pocket along with thousands of other things. This technology is still a long ways off but we're already building the bridge to it with mixed reality and high-res passthrough.

I don’t think you have the capability to understand this thread.

I’m talking about virtual meetings specifically, and then adding a note about why it’ll never be generally popular like we see smartphones only because someone replied with that.

I’ve used VR and whatever joke AR exists (the MS headset) extensively and I don’t need to be familiar with “proponents” to make any argument whatsoever.

VR will be cool for sunset of gaming, some may like it for work. Meetings not so much. AR doesn’t even really exist and no passthrough doesn’t count at least not this decade.

Hey man, I wasn't trying to start a fight so reel it in a bit. If you don't like VR personally, that's fine but I don't think your personal experience generalizes to everyone.

I'm perfectly happy admitting that VR will remain niche for quite some time, just like cellphones did and pretty much for the same reasons: size, cost, battery life, cold start of a tech that requires network effects to grow, and social acceptability of use in public spaces. Similar cycles played a factor in the adoption of home computers and the internet, it takes a while for new technology to get off the ground and the initial versions of it are always clunky and unergonomic compared to later revisions that take into account knowledge gained by building and deploying the naive and constrained design.

VR headsets won't always look like they do now, that can be guaranteed as long as technological progress continues. We can argue about the timeline but I admit that no one can predict the future so what's the point. I do think VR will matter for meetings and social activities, there's a huge market consisting of people who live far away from their loved ones or who lose touch with friends after a move. As the technology and UX improve it will become more common to visit someone in VR instead of calling them occasionally. I did say AR doesn't exist and that what we have right now is MR (Mixed Reality) which involves passthrough. I don't even know what sunset of gaming means, it sounds as non-sensical as sunset of movies or sunset of radio to me.

Subset.

Hey man, I don't think you've spent enough time learning about technology nor humanity to argue any of this.

Your own fault for a bad conversation.

VR with inside-out tracking is way easier to use casually than wired PCVR.

> People just won’t put on world-occluding headsets to talk to cartoons

People already do with VRChat (current average about 19,000 users/day on Steam, likely much more on the standalone app on the Quest 2), and it frankly sucks in a ton of ways. Take an app that captures the same user interest, fix all the shitty parts, and put it on better hardware and I would expect user numbers to explode.

The headset here doesn’t occlude the world it has video pass through.

I think the entire player population of VRChat would like to disagree with you.

The audio latency problem is solved with spatial audio. In VRChat you can easily follow a conversation with 10 people talking over each other, because the audio comes from the direction of their avatars and you can tune it in and out naturally like you do in real life.