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Comment by simmerup | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of people use VR Chat. Once it gets mainstream it'll be common place.

At the moment it's int he same place as IRC was back in the 90s before social media took off

I'd be very interested to see some data here. What's "plenty"?

But the big difference between the 1990s and now is that everybody already has perfectly good text chat. Plus free voice calls and video calls. Plus regular social media for non-synchronous interaction.

I can believe VR Chat is better for some niche of people. But I don't see much reason to think it's going to be enough better than all the other options that people will don special gear for it.

Someone would sure have to convince me that the VR made things a lot better. I'm skeptical given that I rarely even use video for personal calls outside of some group Zoom one group of friends or other put together maybe every couple months.

Yeah, video is a great example. In the movie 2001, which was made in 1968, video calls were The Future just as much as space travel was. But now that we actually have video calls, we've discovered that they're good for some things, but people prefer lower-capability mediums for a lot of things.

In the case of 2001, it also made the assumption that the futuristic video call would be made from... a phone booth as opposed to a mobile device networked to the station's computer.

I suspect many of us would be more inclined to just use video if we were sitting in a video booth--or, as is actually the case, from a place we've arranged to made video call from using a computer. As it is though, when I'm casually chatting with someone, I'll often be multitasking with making dinner or I'll be pausing the video I was watching on the TV. I'm not really setup for video and they're probably in the same boat.

But we know what each other look like anyway. Video is often better for a group call for various reasons but for a 1:1 chat voice is fine.

I've been video chatting my friends since Skype was a P2P app in the mid-2000s, though I was definitely the more introverted/less video-happy friend in the bunch. The friends most interested in video chatting were usually not STEM folks. My Gen-Z baby sibling has been using FaceTime to chat with school friends since they were 12. Even as early as 2014, so very pre-pandemic, 15-20 million FaceTime calls were being made per day [1]. I think you're colored by a STEM bubble, since STEM folks tend to be more private and introverted. Video chatting is huge.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessa...

Fair enough. Honestly, probably not so much about being introverted. I'm actually a marketing person who travels to a lot of events these days :-) But when I'm casually talking 1:1 with someone I know personally, voice-only is just a lot more flexible. I don't mind video but it's more convenient to chat audio-only while also doing something else.

I think where 2001-style projections of the future differ is that they hold up video chatting to be some end-all, be-all goal of future communication. As you say, audio only is more convenient. I'm a dirty tech person and I prefer text even when most of my friends prefer audio. But unless I'm putting my software engineer hat on, I'm not really thinking about "how am I communicating today is it video, voice, or text" I'm just summing up my situation (at home, in public, doing groceries, etc) and finding out how I can communicate with a person. With video, voice, and text all instantly available, none of us really think of one form as paramount, though we all have our preferences. Just like in real life, we all communicate in each other with different ways appropriate to our moods and our settings.

100%. And this isn't a new thing. 25 years ago when I was a product manager, I used to hate the call from a sales rep or systems engineer that involved discussing the weather etc. when all they really cared about was the answer to a specific question which could have been a five minute email. (Not that there is anything wrong with some inefficiency if it helps establish connections.)

Well, your opinion is as valuable as mine: I think you're completely wrong and VR will never be mainstream.

VR for communication may not be. VR for training will almost certainly be in use by millions of people on a daily basis in the very near future. Anything that requires operation of a machine or performance of a physical procedure and some level of risk/cost will probably involve VR.

I'll double your opinion. ;-)

Just so.

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