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posted by martyb on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the 3D-porn dept.

The door to mass-market virtual reality is about to burst open. Engineers have solved most of the hardware challenges, driven down the price to just a few hundred dollars, done extensive testing, and gotten software tools into the hands of creative developers. Store shelves will soon be teeming with head-mounted displays and hand controllers that can paint dazzling virtual worlds. And then the first wave of VR immigrants will colonize them.

You might think the first adopters will be gamers, but you'd be wrong. The killer app for virtual reality will more likely be something to enhance ordinary social experiences—conversations with your loved ones, a business meeting, a college class—but carried out with a far richer connection than you could establish by texting or talking or Skyping.

Jeremy Bailenson, founder of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his coauthors predicted in these pages in 2011 that such "social VR" was on the horizon. "Current social networking and other online sites," they wrote, "are just precursors of what we'll see when social networking encompasses immersive virtual-reality technology. When people interact with others for substantial periods of time, much as they do now on Facebook but with fully tracked and rendered avatars, entirely new forms of social interaction will emerge." With the variety of head-mounted displays—including the Oculus Rift, Sony's PlayStation VR, and the HTC Vive—going on sale later this year, that future is now here.

Prediction: hacking avatars to get through long meetings will become a "thing."


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday December 26 2015, @08:51AM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 26 2015, @08:51AM (#281140)

    Yes, it's bad. If you don't use social media, you're a pariah. A handful of times each year I'll hear from someone without first sending an email or calling. And that's if I'm lucky. As often as not I don't even get a response. I've been out of highschool for 16 years and we haven't had a reunion.

    It wasn't like that before social media bred a generation of people with no manners and no motivation to put in some effort into maintaining friendships.

    It's really sad how people have replaced actual human contact with the incredibly superficial friends lists of people too lazy and socially awkward to interact with people in public.

    They can go fuck themselves, I'm better off without them, but let's not pretend like this has been a good thing for most people. The only people that benefited are the people working for social media and people that had no social skills to begin with.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Geotti on Saturday December 26 2015, @12:04PM

    by Geotti (1146) on Saturday December 26 2015, @12:04PM (#281157) Journal

    A handful of times each year I'll hear from someone without first sending an email or calling. And that's if I'm lucky.

    [...]

    They can go fuck themselves, I'm better off without them [...]

    Hmm...

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Saturday December 26 2015, @07:59PM

      by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 26 2015, @07:59PM (#281261)

      I'm better off without people that are so lazy they can't be bothered to keep up with me without having to be nagged about it constantly or have a huge monument to my ego available at all hours of the day and night to eliminate the need to actually talk with me.

      I sort of understand in the past where you had to actually dial the phone number or worse go out and buy supplies to write a letter. I can sort of understand it, but how much energy does it take to send an email or go into your contacts and make a phone call?

      • (Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday December 28 2015, @09:22AM

        by Geotti (1146) on Monday December 28 2015, @09:22AM (#281634) Journal

        how much energy does it take to send an email or go into your contacts and make a phone call?

        Maybe they just don't know your birthday and don't know when to call you?

        No, j/k.. I don't use social networks either, but I do get crazy looks when I ask for a phone and email these days. And there's –of course– a distinction to be made with regard to people you know and that might be "helpful" in the future, and friends and close acquaintances. For this first group I could see the benefit of a 'professional' social network account.