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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, @02:52AM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday December 26 2015, @02:52AM (#281076)

    Seriously, this is bad, social media has done enough harm to social interactions as it is. Now we're talking about completely removing any and all need to pay attention or generally care about the people we're interacting with all so media companies can spy on our every move and remove any vestige of privacy we might have had.

    People are already abusing technology so that they don't have to develop their memories or do any actual critical thinking. That's bad enough, but taking this is a huge problem in the making.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Tork on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:21AM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 26 2015, @03:21AM (#281083)
    Social media has harmed social interaction? I must have missed that memo while I was spending Christmas Morning with a friend I hadn't seen in a couple of years but kept up with over social media. I wonder how much I've missed by never memorizing their phone number.
    --
    🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
    • (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.

      • (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.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday December 26 2015, @08:59AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Saturday December 26 2015, @08:59AM (#281141) Journal

      I agree with both of you. Social media, as a concept, is not a bad thing unless taken to extremes (since the invention of the letter, some people have retreated from the real world and substituted telecommunication, but they're generally outliers). The problem with the current implementation of social media is the huge amount of power delegated to a small number of groups. Facebook, for example, is literally the only way that some people communicate with each other. A single, for-profit, company that exists solely to harvest profiles to use for advertising is their only way of communicating. They allow this company to read all of their messages, to collect their political opinions, their purchasing patterns, the articles that they read online, and so on.

      Facebook has enough information about enough individuals that they can accurately identify most of the swing voters in a given constituency and the issues that are important to them, and the ability to put targeted ads in front of them. That gives them everything that they need to control elections (or, as they currently do, to sell this information to the highest bidder) - what happens when every swing voter in a state sees adverts saying that candidate X cares deeply about {issue that this person cares about}? It doesn't matter whether Facebook is actually evil, people are giving them so much power that even mildly careless use of it can have a huge impact.

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:58PM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Saturday December 26 2015, @05:58PM (#281234)

    Social media is garbage and people should not use it. Why support massive surveillance engines that abuse the users in every way possible? It's foolish.

    With that said, not everyone is all that interested in social reaction. Extreme introverts, for example. Reality is boring and ugly and I could use less of it, which is why any social "app" will be meaningless. What a completely boring use of a technology that has potential.

    But all of it will be meaningless if it's not 100% Free Software. Just like people shouldn't use "social media", people should not use software that does not respect their freedoms.