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Comment by hnthrowaway0328 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don't get is why there is a such high regard of visual input. I mean, we can speak to our friends since the telephone age, and we can see them on screen too since maybe the 90s. Is there a huge demand to actually see them IN THE SAME ROOM?

I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.

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A lot of people find asynchronous and text-based communication to be unpleasant. This maybe isn’t the most common sentiment on a tech news discussion forum, but probably describes much of the population. I think the internet’s potential to help people socialize is really hobbled by the text form factor of social media, chat, and discussion forums. Video and voice calls are richer, but they aren’t good a good way to meet people.

I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.

Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.

This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.

There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.

Personally I find video (Facetime/Duo/etc) to be more immersive than audio-only when talking with someone. If there's a similar leap in perceived connection with some AR/VR gear then I'm all for it.

Video chats with more than 3 people start to suffer from an inability to have multiple conversations at the same time. Physical distance of a couple feet and visual queues like the direction of a speakers face allow that in 3d space. Maybe someone can overcome this in 2d? I haven't seen it yet.

I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.

Check out kumospace. Start up with a really fun, functional solution to this problem. Maybe just a novelty generally but for a remote happy hour it was a game changer.

gather.town is a pretty great forum for this

Maybe it is a cultural thing.

Zoom mediates almost all meetings at my company. We went full-remote in 2020, and are now heavily international.

Screen sharing is heavily used, but nobody uses cameras except for presentations.

Even aside from our work norms, I have a strong preference for voice-only realtime comms. Video just doesn't add value to me.

I don't know! I do know that I vastly prefer meeting people in person, compared to talking on the phone, and I think it is the same for a lot of people. I prefer it so much that I occasionally spend hundreds of dollars on airplane tickets to travel to see friends and family and attend meetings in person.

There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!

Isn't this the same argument as 'we have telephones. Why do we ever need to see the people on screens, isn't voice enough?'

Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d

Lots of communication was more effective with voice calls than video calls.

> Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d

Or in VR for that matter...

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