When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.

VRChat avatars have personality. On hardware now 6 years old.

People are reacting to the lack of personality, not the lack of immersion.

The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

no. no it is not.

for one thing, people are always going to need to view screens when they are not at home or at work.

screens have a VERY long way to go before you can reproduce the clarity and just sheer number of pixels available to display clear information to the eyes in VR.

even if eye tracking is used, and even if you only render where the user is looking, the virtual monitors must be legible, and VR headsets are nowhere near that kind of pixel density, yet. they're fine for rendering scenery and walls and avatars, and conveying motion, but if you want to read a screen of text on one of your five virtual monitors without leaning in and making that monitor consume much more field of view, you're going to need LCD displays for headsets which have 10x the resolution in both X and Y than are available today. maybe only 7x.

and there will always be afterbirths like me who get motion sick instantly, and for a full 24 hours minimum, in VR no matter how good the experience is.

I'll keep my monitors, thanks.

BTW if you're actually interested in this, Carmack talks about this and the state of the Oculus around ~ 56 min in the linked video.

> absurd amounts of money on fancy mechanical keyboards

Fancy mechanical keyboards aren't really expensive? (compared to monitors, or space, or even really VR headsets…) Most of the people I know who have them also have them because RSI. That forces you into being an enthusiast whether you want it or not. But a single trip to the doctors saved and the keyboard pays for itself.

But they're also just better keyboards too.

I find this tendency funny. It's kinda crazy we keep building new very hard innovative software to avoid needing to fix boring software.

I bet vscode will never support multiple monitors, even in vr.

Our massive real estate issues that are pricing people out of having enough space to live in the last decades, have less to do with the population growth in the world in this time frame and more to do with immigration and economic and building policies that must see the asset prices always go up by significant margins to "beat the market".

There's also the issue of location and internal and external migration where given a constant worldwide population, everyone is migration to the handful of cities with jobs, infrastructure and QoL, pushing prices up. I've seen this in my home country that saw a massive population decline yet a massive increase in real estate prices proving that the price of housing is not determined by taking the number of houses in the country and dividing it by the number of people in the country giving us the supply/demand ratio determining the housing price factor, as not people are competing for real estate but piles of money are, since it's also a speculative investment vehicle, and so the bigger piles of money are winning, regardless of the total houses to people ratio.

I've gone a bit off topic but my point is that the struggle for affordable living space is real and is gonna get worse despite the world population not increasing that much, as in traditional capitalist fashion, the banks, companies and people who already have wealth and assets will use it as leverage to aquire more of it, pushing the prices up, at the detriment of those trying to enter the market now with less capital.

TL;DR: The housing situation has nothing to do with population growth trends but everything to do with growing piles of money competing for a pie that's relatively fixed in size. This cannot end well.

And remember these scenes can be modified by users and are loaded as needed.

This is not like a precooked scene in a computer game where designers spend weeks fine-tuning the lighting model.

I notice pretty much all quest apps use ambient lighting only which gives them this fake look. Some nice spotlights would do a world of good. But I guess anything better than this is just too expensive for the system.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

They could take some polygons out of the glasses and give the characters legs at least!

Update: They are a actually doing a lot there. The lips and eyebrows are moving. It has skinned animation. When I started in the industry we were designing characters that would inanimate without skinning, everything was static like a wooden puppet.

But still I agree with the other commenters, they should have gone MORE cartoony and more simple. This is just a simultaneously creepy and goofy middle-ground.

Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars. There would be no interaction! You'd spend all your time rendering.

You mean like... video?

It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.) It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.

Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect. And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.

People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.

[1] https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6509-introducin...

does it?

I think it is weird for a different reason: it looks like 1990s tech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds