I for one am amazed that "video game characters" are stuck in video games and don't come out in forms like:

   * an assistant at the drug store that lives on the screen has the image of a body and can make eye contact with you
   * a 3-d graphic performer that does a sketch comedy act with a human performer that is reflected into a mirror like "pepper's ghost"

Technologies that are ready to "break through" (like the internet in 1994) often exist at a mature level somewhere but haven't spread for some reason. For instance, this 1971 book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...

anticipated that cnn.com would exist around 1981; actually you could read news headlines on Compuserve. France had minitel, other countries had videotext, but there wasn't enough centralization in most places for large-scale online services to hit big until the technology had passed the threshold at which it could have worked by an order of magnitude.

Then it went off like a bomb.