I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.
I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.
Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.
This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.
There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.
I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.
Zoom mediates almost all meetings at my company. We went full-remote in 2020, and are now heavily international.
Screen sharing is heavily used, but nobody uses cameras except for presentations.
Even aside from our work norms, I have a strong preference for voice-only realtime comms. Video just doesn't add value to me.
There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!
Feeling truly present with someone isn't possible in 2d
Or in VR for that matter...
The best choice they made was to sell a balanced Oculus (high-res and decent battery with low-power compute) as a loss leader rather than continue down the tethered high-powered Rift path.
AR screens, SLAM, 3d reconstruction has well over a dozen well-funded companies gunning for the same result. Several companies are going to lose hard, similar to Magic Leap's recapitalization.
They aren't in the same room, just same screen, but I'm not sure that really has value for me anyway?
On that note, I wonder if a pair of wide angle cameras could be used to create a reasonably convincing three-dimensional live stream via FaceTime. With VR glasses, participants in the call would be able to see each others surroundings in 3D space.
This sounds more immersive, and less goofy than the metaverse. It also seems like a feature that Apple could reasonably deliver with their rumoured glasses.
What, wrong decade?
In terms of tangible results, Meta may as well have pivoted to autonomous vehicles. The only way this pivot makes sense would be if they had actually delivered a headset people wanted.
Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.