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Comment by hnuser123456 | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in tech becoming really magic, lookup the VRchat club scene. Real-life skilled DJs put out of clubs by covid, setup a twitch stream with a webcam on their DJ controller, while wearing full-body VR themselves, also streaming their DJ software and in-game view to an in-world stage screen in front of up to 80 guests, many if not most also wearing full-body VR, dancing along together, in any kind of digital world and wearing any kind of semi-humanoid (or not) 3D model you can imagine. The "metaverse" has already been running for a few years, but it's not Meta's, it's a thin multiplayer VR wrapper over Unity.

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People alone in their rooms strapped screen into their face, just to be "together with other people" sounds more like dystopian nightmare to me

Can't deny there's an aspect of that to it, yeah. But to the ravers and clubbers, this was a lifesaver.

I suppose I'm struggling to see the dystopian nightmare in that?

Is Discord dystopian because people alone in their rooms have a headphone fitted to their head "just to be 'together with other people'"?

Is it that it's more immersive than just audio and therefore...somehow bad?

It’s that you’re alone in a room with a screen strapped to your face looking at pixels instead of seeing, touching, feeling, smelling, hearing, sweating, dancing, and sensing in the middle of a rave of physical human beings

It’s literally senseless in comparison, lossy digitalization of basic analog humanity ie dystopian

Yes even voice chat feels dystopian if thats all your interaction with other humans. Social platforms have ironically made us less social beings. Real ourselves live in the digital world while our fake zombie selves do the mundane tasks in the real world. It does not feel right at all. Its easier to connect and find similar people through internet so i get why it is like this, but i think its also the factor thats making us less mentally balanced, causing real world to feel more foreign and harder to interact with. Drug of social interaction that's not real which leaves you lonely in the end.

I would say the cause is that current internet social connection techniques don't have enough depth to them. Telephone doesn't let you see hand or facial emotions of the other person. Twitter/facebook is only using a keyboard + reading text. Instagram you can see a snapshot of an instant and peoples thoughts about that instant. etc...

VR is working to try and bridge all of these by essentially creating a transporter/teleporter to a shared physical space. Imagine if VRChat was a 1-to-1 replication of you. I feel like this is one of the end goals of VR.

  Its easier to connect and find similar people through internet so i get why it is like this, but i think its also the factor thats making us less mentally balanced

This isn't true of just internet, this is true of cities. People no longer care about one another, each person/bond is replaceable with another one. i.e dating apps only help prove this fact. We no longer need to rely on one another to survive and therefore are more independent. We are less willing to give up (sacrifice) parts of our independence and less tolerant of flaws in others. I think this is what leads to higher divorce rates now. How many people live in high rise buildings and actually know many of their neighbors?

Or something to do in the middle of a global pandemic?

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