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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

I bought an Oculus Quest 2 earlier this year to check out the whole VR situation. It was basically a ghost town with pockets of children and, IMHO, sketchy folks having childlike conversation.

I don't really know what I expected but it wasn't that. Aside from some focus issues the goggle hardware was pretty great but the VR world was not a good experience at all. :/

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It's worth noting for anyone curious: the Quest 2 can't actually interact with or enter the majority of worlds because of technical constraints (they aren't even offered to Quest 2 users unless the author of the world explicitly opts into it and designs their world for it). Most adults are on private, PC-focused servers.

The application is not a stunning technical achievement, but it's unfair to judge the program by jcim's summary, because he seemingly went into it without knowledge of how it worked and wasn't able to access any of the interesting places. It would be like judging Skyrim by an SNES backport.

While all of this is true, one should also note that none of this is obvious at any point while using VR Chat. It might be the most popular social VR app right now (Altspace has even more problems, and RecRoom is pretty much strictly children), but that doesn't mean the software is actually any good. We're in the Friendster/MySpace/Neopets days of social VR, with Facebook seemingly interested in making the LinkedIn.

Honestly, the game starts at the point where you meet a group of people you enjoy interacting with and stop visiting public instances. Much easier to get in to with a friend to guide you along the way.

Yes, this is absolutely true. It's probably true for most people of most social software, but for me the immediacy and intimacy of VR and voice chat definitely amplify it a lot.

The popular public worlds are like going onto AOL general chatrooms when those were popular. You get a lot of random people sticking around and often some obnoxious people. It's possible to find good conversation buddies and friends through them but it takes a lot of hopping between public worlds.

The real magic is when you either A) have friends who are already into it invite you directly to worlds with them and their friends, or B) find the niche public worlds that have a more mature and invested userbase. (Sadly, a lot of the niche worlds aren't compatible with VRChat on the Quest when running in standalone mode; you have to connect the Quest to a computer to get the full experience.)

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