To be fair, none of your "arguments" went above PR speak, and you're mentioning realities that pale in comparison to my example: Second Life in the early 2000 when every company on Earth was rushing to have its own virtual land just because if was the future. A future pushed not in marginalia on tech/business publications, but in big articles on national newspapers, just like early this year they tried to make NFTs into "a big thing" in the art world. It wasn't just that linden had a barely working infrastrutture that could be improved later: they also had a massive mindshare that VR just wishes to have, and failed to materialize even as Ready Player One was sent to evangelize.
What's more important? Hype or sustained user growth? I'd pick the latter, and while a social VR application has yet to exceed Second Life's peak, there is a clear trajectory that it will - and it took upwards of 5 years for Second Life itself to peak.
Just because there isn't a goldrush in making social VR applications doesn't mean that it's a pie in the sky dream. We're past the peak of inflated expectations for VR, so it has gone through it's own initial hype phase. We've been here before for prior computing platforms. PCs for example, were hyped up greatly in the late 70s and early 80s, but grew slowly, causing a number of companies to back away a bit. Therefore, if VR has 'failed' as you say, to materialize, so too did PCs back then.
VR and prior computing platforms failed to reach the impossible expectations set for it because that's how analysts and mainstream media do things - they overestimate in the short-term. What VR and PCs back then experienced is normal growth, and we're roughly on track.
Few of your arguments have any weight because you have barely given any, you're just trying to brush in my face the fact that you "know things" and i "know nothing", and your proof that "i know nothing" isn't that you're punching holes to what i say, but that the existence of my critique is proof that i can't criticize you, that if "i knew" i'd agree and if i don't agree then i don't know. That's the tautology logical fallacy at work, not "an argument".
I have given you statistics and facts for the industry. If you really want me to provide you links and sources to specific things other than what I will present in this thread, then I'll do so. What arguments are you not agreeing with that you want me to source? Because we disagree on such fundamental points that I can source, this very much means that I know for a fact that you are not in the know when it comes to VR. Will there be disagreements when we have the same information on the table? Maybe, but at that point you at least know all the facts, which isn't the case now.
linking articles from impartial sources about how VR improves person to person connection at a distance (that aren't from, I dunno, "believeinyourlordandsaVioR.com" or some really uncredited scientific journal, aren't financed by VR corps and if they are, that they have at least a decent case study and not "we gave those 10 tech students a vr headset and asked..." which is something I've found while digging for studies myself), especially all of this have to be compared to classical well known technologies like zoom. If you're right it's not hard to have real data, real arguments rather than trust me i'm deep into this.
Are you disagreeing with the logical conclusion that VR improves person to person connection at a distance? This isn't rocket science; it's common sense. If you know that VR makes you feel like you are somewhere else, or at least gives a kind of feeling like that, and if you know what social VR feels like, you also know it accomplishes a lot of unique social benefits.
To argue otherwise is ignoring plain facts. That's not to say it is the end-all-be-all of remote communication today, because it currently clearly lacks facial expressions and real human fidelity unlike video calls, but what we have today objectively improves on many aspects of remote communication.
If you're suggesting that this only affects the 'tiny vr tech enthusiast bubble' and that's where this post's implied skepticism of the benefits come from, well sure, it only benefits those who use it, but I don't see what you gain from saying that? We both agree that VR is niche today.
Also, I have absolutely presented the right sources in this thread. Nothing is incomplete - and if anything, one of the sources I provided is a mega collection of other sources. Whenever I posted a source in this thread, it gave the full context of what I was relating it to. Any links to VR sites like RoadToVR or UploadVR cite the original source, making them free of bias so long as you use that original source.
But that this will turn into the mainstream embracing VR as surrogate social "in presence" communication tool, in fact one that can and will make simple videocalls "obsolete" or less preferable despite the ubiquity of the hardware to run them and their simplicity, or that will fill the psychological role of going to a unique gathering that right now you can simply do within Fortnite in your cellphone... that's an extraordinary claim that calls for extraordinary evidence.
The ubiquity of the hardware running video calls was a small niche for a good while too, but it certainly got over that hump. More to the point, if you want extraordinary evidence, I will provide you extraordinary insight - because I don't claim to know the literal future, just which way the wind is blowing, and what current and past mindsets are like.
I showed a video earlier in the thread of a near-photorealistic avatar head with facial expressions. Here's a full body version of that (currently not real-time):
This is very convincing already as a video, but the nature of VR will make it moreso in a headset. This level of fidelity would make it akin to a video call. Traditional video calls start to really break apart with more than a few people, whereas VR doesn't. This makes VR a much better (and not for novelty sake, but to actually understand/read cues more accurately) solution to group video calls, aside from the headset requirement which I'll get into later.
You can play around with how video calls work, by having for example a 2D auditorium where everyone's avatars show up in seats instead of a grid layout. That can help make it easier to ground people in a certain spot, but you're still seeing small camera feeds when you have a large group in there.
You can also add spatial audio, but the reception is mixed with trials of High Fidelity's implementation - some say it feels better, and some say it feels eerie. Why? Well, you're getting cues that don't quite match up with how our ears work in real life; VR doesn't have this issue. It works as expected.
You can have 2D game environments or interactive web pages where you have a basic avatar (could even be a simple circle you drag around) and camera feeds fade in/out as you get close to other avatars, allowing for easy breakout groups and volume control. The advantage here is that it's pretty easy for non-gamers to get used to, but the 2D world becomes largely unimportant and is only a means to get from A to B.
You can have 3D game environments where you stick a video call onto a 3D avatar's head, but there will always be a large mismatch with the avatar and the camera feed, and your agency is very limited compared to VR since you don't have body language that affects the virtual world.
Those are all the ways video calls are experimenting. What is missing in all these examples? The world, the body language, and a sense of presence. No improvements can fix these for video calls (although you can improve body language a bit using cameras like Facebook's Portal camera combined with synthesizing eye contact by altering the stream contents to make a users eyes always gaze at the screen).
A video call is mostly useful for connecting with a very small group of people where the main goal is to talk and stare at each other. You can do other activities with video calls of course, but it is quite limiting when you are competing for screen real estate.
VR is as much of an activity space as it is a sit-and-chat tool. I've already listed tons of activities from VRChat in a past post so I won't go into those.
You mention the phycological role of gatherings and present the idea that people could be just fine with Fortnite on a phone - but they aren't. We have the data to back this up. We get an oxytocin release when we communicate in person, so is this effect recreated somewhat in VR? Well, you need to meet the same or at least similar communication satisfaction.
As shown from the results of this paper, you can see that people had glimpses of this in-person effect or that they could tell it was a real person even beyond an avatar. I'd also wager that it's better today with how avatar software has improved.
They also found that there were levels of social engagement that go beyond real life face to face communication, to get rid of unsatisfactory parts of communicating in real life, and further improve some of the good aspects. I know where they're coming from, as my own experience with VR is that it at times can be a more expressive reality than actual reality.
PDF | Room-scale virtual reality (VR) holds great potential as a medium for communication and collaboration in remote and same-time, same-place... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net
Look into Stanford's Virtual Human Intereaction Lab as well as Mel Slater's work to see more in this area.
I would advise you to go into social VR yourself, and ask around, and maybe you'll even experience it yourself. Ask people if VR - and only VR - socialization feels like you are face to face with another person. With the caveat that it's not exactly the same of course, but provides similar benefits. I would easily expect the majority to agree here, and we're still so, so early on it how good social VR feels - before eye/face/hand tracking, personalized HRTFs, spatialized audio, and even just the visual presentation of the headset.
Humans evolved to bond socially face to face over many tens of thousands of years, so it shouldn't come as a shock that people are not satisfied with 2D screen interactions as a substitute for real life. People like them in moderation, and people flocked to video calls in the pandemic because let's be honest, it was the easiest and most well known immersive solution; 99.9% of the people doing video calls have never even heard of social VR or are aware that it exists, so they won't go looking for it. They therefore see video calls as the best option and may like it in moderation, but prolonged use can cause zoom fatigue because the brain is processing extra information that can't be conveyed properly on a 2D screen.
I would also like to present a thought experiment. Imagine a social activity in Fortnite, like the Travis Scott concert, played on your phone. Do you think people would say this is comparable to a real concert? It's very obvious that the answer would be a majority no, because it cannot provide a similar experience - I mean you're not even dancing for one.
Do the same for VR and it will be a different result, but admittedly there are a number of important shortcomings - that is for today anyway - those will be solved as VR advances.
VR is a much more versatile platform for communication that presents more social engagement which is a social boon and a productivity boon (as creativity often sparks in the spontaneous conversations of office culture), and given the craze over online personas and filters, it presents by far the most expressive way to represent yourself as you can become any form you want to the point of rewiring the very neurons in your brain - that's how convincing it can be.
The drawbacks of VR then are basically it's inconvenience, bulk, and side effects like eye strain/headaches/sickness. The good news is that we have a pathway to solve each of these in turn.
I showed the sunglasses VR display system a few pages back, but here's information on dealing with eye strain/headaches/sickness, by solving the vergence accommodation conflict - which would in fact make it healthier on the eyes than any 2D screen.
A primer on the conflict:
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/obscure-neuroscience-problem-thats-plaguing-vr/
A good talk showcasing solutions, some of which have been demonstrated:
https://uploadvr.com/douglas-lanman-facebook-imaging/
Right now, VR is failing to even convince gamers to get into it, and the argument "a better Superhot" -citing a post on this thread- is much more convincing as far as I'm concerned, and blatantly true to anybody who ever tried a headset.
Again with the failing. It's doing as expected from industry insiders back when headsets were launching. If people have impossible standards in the first place, then those expectations are not going to be met.
If you’re at all involved in the VR space, you likely recently saw a flurry of downtrodden headlines describing “slow,” and “modest,” holiday VR headset sales, with some even calling VR “the biggest loser this holiday.” The impetus of those headlines was a major revision of research firm...
www.roadtovr.com
