This past weekend I was at Desert Trip in California, and I got the chance to talk to neighbors from Austral-Asia, Europe, and the US. This was a diverse group to say the least, ad we were all camping next to another on 408th and Broadway. The conversation got onto VR, and we all agreed, without a doubt that their is no substitute for human contact and that the whole term Virtual Reality was a contradiction and a not very slick marketing term. No one wanted anything to do with VR. In fact, the conversation about VR was so disgusting to all of us, we all had to just drop it. NO ONE wanted VR, and any company betting on it is betting against the house and the players at the same time. We all thought the big bets could be used for much better causes. Just some info.
Countless technologies, including the internet and social media, have become augments and indeed sometimes substitutes for human contact. Some of the biggest companies in the world have been built on those technologies.
Why does VR need to be solitary and why does it need to be any different?
So was I. VR can be social in the same way Facebook can be social.
You might be able to argue that Facebook-style interaction replacing face-to-face meeting is a bad thing, but you can't argue it's something nobody wants.
Once touch, smell, and taste are incorporated into VR, why wouldn't it serve as a substitute?
For some people, these technologies represent an advancement over good old human contact. Although this example is AR, Pokémon Go helped a number of children with autism and Asperger's syndrome helped a number of children explore the outside world and it facilitated a tech-augmented human contact.
In some ways it can be superior. It's great that you have the luxury of being able to interact with such an international group of friends. That doesn't extend to everyone. Like the Internet, VR allows people to interact globally.
As a kid who grew up in a somewhat undesirable neighborhood and had limited meat space friends, I know personally that virtual relationships can be just as important as traditional ones. I'm wasnt limited to the somewhat closed minded people that were within biking distance. This was well before the time of social media, so their looks, their popularity, their gender, their race/ethnicity did not matter. Really, the only way one could be biased was if they were a grammar nazi.
Think about what this can do for children who are physically disabled or have autoimmune disorders or are living in totalitarian regimes where being different can lead to persecution.
> and we all agreed, without a doubt that their is no substitute for human contact
it depends on the context. Slack is replacing human contact for me, today, because I've decided not to show up at work since I can communicate (sometimes more effectively in writing than in speech) with my cofounders on our product development.
And the same can be said for social media, email, etc. They are different experiences, perhaps inferior to human contact if certain things the experience offers (again, depending on the context) matter more than what you get in other experiences.
My sister is studying in Europe. It will be fun to VR chat with her, rather than use a phone or WhatsApp.
AR and VR excel in different areas. AR is a natural fit for most social contexts because it brings elements of the digital world into the physical world without completely enveloping the senses. VR isolates the senses, which provides deeper immersion. A virtual environment can be similar to the real world or completely removed from it. The rules of the physical world don't apply in VR.
I agree with Cook that AR will likely be more popular in terms of daily/casual usage by the average person, but VR will be just as "huge" in terms of societal impact. And some of his comments about the socially-isolating nature of VR are a bit short-sighted. Facebook (and others) are already doing a lot of work on getting people into shared spaces with high-fidelity avatars that really do give a sense of being with someone who's not physically there.
And with 360° photo/video, volumetric 3D video, 3D scanning/printing, photogrammetry, etc-- we're quickly moving toward a "mixed" reality world where the line between AR/VR is blurred anyway.
