No, there is a study that was done on PC rift hardware that showed it was already competitive with f2f on most measures of social presence except for facial expressions (which makes sense, given the lack of facial tracking.)

The bottleneck for adoption is probably mostly about UX, comfort, norms, marketing, etc. Not raw capabilities.

Laughable - that's like saying "this cake has 80% of the required ingredients, we're almost there with the exception of flour and sugar".

The uncanny valley on the raw capabilities of these current products is a grand canyon. Holodeck it ain't.

Not really, I’d imagine if you ran the same trial today with face and eye tracking HMDs you would match f2f social presence scores. Wouldn’t surprise me if the study has already been done. You’re confusing graphics quality and realism with just the subset of what is needed to hit face to face social presence. That bar is much lower: high resolution, low latency, good tracking. The actual GPU power beyond that doesn’t put a ceiling since conveying non verbal communication doesn’t require expensive rasterization.

It feels like you're just moving goalposts by defining some arbitrary metric of "f2f social presence scores". It doesn't really matter how much any individual test does against these "scores" if your average person walks away feeling "That felt nothing like a face to face meeting I'm used to having with actual, live humans."

You’re just arguing at this point. The scores I’m talking about are not arbitrary, there are a few standardized measures used in social presence research to attempt to make apples to apples comparisons between communications tools attempting to compete with f2f. The point is that the scores people give are literally asking users to convey their feeling that the experience met the baseline of face to face, or not, along various dimensions. You sound like you have an axe to grind, and aren’t actually looking to understand anything new here.

I wonder how much we need facial expressions for VR communication. You can convey a lot in Source games just by crouching and violently shaking your mouse... plus nobody's trying to blow you up in a work environment (hopefully).

You can also fake it. My app jel.app has avatars that have a lot of facial animation and it’s either random or just driven off voice, and conveys a lot imo.

There is a limit and a point where this can make things worse, but if it approximates what a person expects well enough and never conflicts with that expectation it’s a good tool.

From my experience working with VR hardware I came away thinking that we're very far away from hitting the required comfort zone for mass appeal. The challenges you outline: UX, comfort are going to be crazy hard to over come and I think there's a lot more work on the hardware side.

Mobile phones offers people a very comfortable and easy UX that blends well with the requirements of the real world, you could say it does it too well as you often see people walking down the street faces glued to their screen and not looking where they're walking.

VR needs the power of immersion, but right now it comes at great cost. The friction of entering and exiting is big, the time between task switching of virtual and real is big.

You mentioned this:

> In VR you multitask by bringing the computing environment into the virtual environment. So there is no deficit there.

You cannot and bring all required tasks into the virtual. You can't quickly check on your dog, grab a drink, glance over to a person in your physical space, grab that note from your desk. We rely heavily on the real world and VR right now presents a big barrier. Phones do not, you can watch a movie on TV and glance at the message that pops up on your phone. Even desktop computing allows you to comfortably multitask by glancing between monitors. Some stuff can bring virtualized into VR windows, but it's limited.

I exited VR in 2018 after a few years of working on it. My conclusion was that we're still too early to get bullish. We still need to overcome some big technological hurdles that bridge the gap between comfortable and complete immersion (100% audio & visual simulation), a blend (AR), and 100% real world. We also needs to better address other immersive factors such as haptics and interfacing, because as you increase the potency in one area (visuals) the requirements in other areas start to rise as the playing field demands completeness or risks breaking that desired immersion level.

It’s surprisingly not that far behind. We’re already close to having commercial headsets with full-body tracking, eye tracking and facial tracking.

Even without those technologies current VR is quite different in terms of social presence to interacting on a flat screen. A lot of body language comes through even just tracking the head and hands.

I think we’re quite a bit away from having mass adoption of VR though. But that’s more form factor and comfort.