My team have been developing Remotely (https://meetings.remotelyhq.com/) with this very thing in mind - customizable avatars, voice-driven animation and expressions, animated emoticons, cinematic rooms, interactibles. It's still very early stages, but the main observation is that the scope of problems people are having with communication is too large. Some people want to feel less anxious in meetings, some want accountability, some productivity, some want "fun" and customize stuff, others want video, screensharing etc. It's hard to pinpoint "the problem" that's tangible and solvable outside of the base must-have features. "feeling more like part of the team while working remotely" is not an easy problem to tackle.

Gather.Town provides avatars moving around in a 2D world that you can design, or you can clone from a library of templates. it's not full 3D characters walking around a space, but when we used it for a 48 hour weekend conference we found it a great balance between simplicity, usability, flexibility, and power.

We could go from room to room, conversation to conversation.

I'm guessing that's what they mean with "I have seen a videogame-like attempt". I can see that a lot of companies wouldn't consider it stylistically appropriate.

It's possible to create much more "sophisticated" settings, although choices of avatars are still limited.

I agree, I can see how some companies would dismiss it on those grounds. I'm glad I've never been involved with companies like that, because it feels like a good balance between system demands, usability, effectiveness, and ease of use.

So far I've found attempts at full 3D "proper" environments cringe-making. Perhaps they'll improve, and my fear is that when someone gets the 3D environment glossy and slick, the suits will make people use that, even if the video and audio components are vile, simply because it "looks better".

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out over the next 5 years.

It'll be the virtual manifestation of the different aproach to offices:

Tech companies will be video-gamey and childish but fun and effective.

Old school companies will have pointless expensive VR that is boring and slows everything down (but kinda works, and is sold by Microsoft).

Exactly! Not "corporate" looking/feeling enough. A more formal kind of software would be more attractive for even serious events like Customer events or business meetings.