“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” - Picasso
A couple of years ago, I sat down with my friend for a game of chess. After a few minutes of chatting and playing, I realised that I had completely forgotten he wasn’t really there.
I took my headset off and it was like he had just left the room. I think that being able to provide the feeling that someone you love is there with you (when they are far away) is why people use a lot of tech.
It was a feeling that 2d FaceTime just cannot give you (and it felt like a bigger advancement than going from a phone call to video calls).
If Vision Pro’s face reconstruction thing works well I can see that being the killer app.
I had a similar feeling without VR: working from home + having friends far away meant I spent a lot of time on video chat du jour.
One day I set up the TV with a spare computer and webcam, and used that instead of phone, laptop, or even desktop.
The difference was huge, and exponentially so when the other party was doing the same.
With selfie webcams we got person-centric mugshots, with room webcams we connected places.
It was like having opened a portal to another place, we could move around each one's place very naturally, which only reinforced the connection between people. Just a little bit of care with placement and angle went a long way to drive the illusion. I remember that a couple of times we honest to god unconsciously tried to hand over objects through the screen.
Brains are so easy to trick. As it seems to be currently my cobbled up setup looks better than floating mugshots.
Also not addressed and never shown is how the VR user shows up to these FaceTime users. I mean the wearer doesn't have themselves captured by the device? And it can't take into account other people naturally walking into the room.
Yes! I did basically that with a Logi C920 something + a 42" TV.
And yes the perspective is wrong, things don't line up, objects and textures don't match, but after a few minutes it doesn't matter, basically as long as you get the horizontal plane right the brain just adjusts and still believes you're looking through a window.
I sat with my long distance gf to watch TV together, and genuinely forgot that we weren’t in the same room. It was magic. Taking the goggles off and instantly going back to being alone in my house was an eye opener; I realised that while VR is not as good as really being there, it’s so much better than a video chat for feeling close.
It's also entirely implausible, from an evolutionary perspective, that plants should have developed the capacity to feel pain on a scale similar to other organisms given that they haven't developed the ability to move away from situations that might cause them pain (pain being a proxy for survival risk).
Keep in mind that instead of fight or flight plants have a range of internal chemical responses available to minimise damage and that this does make pain plausible:
Videos of plants calcium signalling response to damage:
You can find a lot more material in this vein.
My point is that we are “animalists” and not very well predisposed to recognising the true nature of plants given how different they are to us.
I think this is why trying out new VR experiences is so compelling.
In a game about gardening you would just give the user a trowel and they’d already know how to play the game. VR devs are gleefully getting rid of quite a lot of metaphors and abstractions in UI that we take for granted.
reply