Item — HN Reader

> I don’t know that many people who would prefer this to a Zoom call.

puts hand up

VRChat, even in its nascent, unrefined, laggy phase, is still much more engaging than any video call I've been on. Sharing the same space with someone improves the experience of communication immeasurably. It's hard to explain, but they no longer feel like a face on a screen, and that enables a much stronger bond.

> Plus this is not full body scanning, it requires you (again) to lose all perception of the real world (zoom doesn’t) and even the scanning that was used for this call requires a full body scanning room which you know, no one is going to have. Both Lex and Zuck went through a significant scanning process to get this level of fidelity.

Yes, this is true at present. However, they're actively working on reducing the requirements for the scan; this is them demonstrating what's possible at the high-end. This is a similar strategy to what Apple's doing with the Vision Pro: they're setting the benchmark before trying to shrink the cost.

Speaking of, you can already see a potential future towards low-cost scanning in Apple's Personas. They're obviously much lower in quality, but they're quick and easy to scan. The future is trending towards that kind of experience, not getting imaged by a dedicated rig.

> Plus again there is no reason whatsoever to do this in a VR environment vs an AR environment using the Apple Vision Pro (which is a real product that has potential, since it’s not VR).

Both are good! You're not wrong about the potential of AR teleconferencing. VR teleconferencing lets you set the scene and share an environment with the users, though, which has its own benefits. (Especially when it comes to spatial arrangement; it's much easier / less mind-bendy to have a single shared environment than to have everyone have their own view of the proceedings. Curious to see how Apple will deal with this, though.)

1 comments

There is an over sampling of individuals like yourself who enjoy VR here on HN, on Reddit, or on any other tech platform where enthusiasts naturally gather.

I believe every single word of what you said about enjoying VRchat, and that product has been out for ages. What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.

My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.

AR is, like you said, soon entering its infancy thanks to Apple doing a PARC and releasing a high cost developer prototype.

> There is an over sampling of individuals like yourself who enjoy VR here on HN, on Reddit, or on any other tech platform where enthusiasts naturally gather.

Without a doubt, yeah.

> What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.

Just above 90,000 [0]. Yes, a far cry from the billions of existing social networks. But I think that's because of a couple of factors, owing to...

> My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.

this. I believe the rejection of consumer VR is not primarily because of the alienation factor - it's because the experience has sucked and costs a lot more than people are willing to spend on a new experience.

I'm a long-time believer in VR; I've been paying attention to it from its 2012 resurgence. However, in that decade, I've seen a few fundamental reasons for why people either don't bother trying it out, or give up shortly afterwards:

- Cost. A good PCVR experience can easily cost thousands of dollars. For VRChat, you really do want that experience (you can only access a subset of content on standalone), and it does not come cheap.

- Comfort. The headsets are not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.

- Isolation. You can't see outside of your space, and other people can't see what you're doing.

- UX. The companies progressing VR have historically not been very good at UX - it's very easy to have a subpar experience with the software.

- Software. There's some high-quality content, but there's not enough of it to sustain interest.

The reason I still believe in it as a medium, despite these problems, is that they're not fundamentally insurmountable blockers. Despite all of these very annoying problems, the strength of the medium still shines through to those who can tolerate it.

There are paths forward for each of these problems; the cost of hardware will be driven down, headsets will get lighter and smaller, there are solutions to let reality in and to let others into your reality, and software troubles can be fixed with iteration and concerted effort from companies who can be bothered.

My existence proof of these things are the existence of the Quest lineup, the Bigscreen Beyond, and the Vision Pro. They all solve parts of the problem - with the Vision Pro being the strongest showing to date - and it's not too hard to envision a future in which one ecosystem has a solution to all of them. It will just take time and effort.

At present, I see the ecosystem being not unlike pre-iPhone smartphones; they exist, they work, but they're lacking the fundamental polish and comforts that a wider audience requires. And like the iPhone, there will come a moment where those things come together, and it will become accessible to the wider consumer market.

I don't think that's happening soon - the Vision Pro is three thousand dollars more and a few hundred grams more than it needs to be - but there's a path forward.

I also don't consider AR to be a separate technology; it's a part of the wider spectrum of XR. Improvements in AR will feed into VR, and vice versa. The Vision Pro is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset, after all.

[0]: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...