I hope they have serious plans for changing how VR works today. VR quickly loses it's appeal after a few hours. The isolation it brings with it is a huge issue. AR holds more promise in terms of mass appeal but I'm not sure we have that one quite figured out yet technically and from a UX perspective.
I know very little about VR so maybe this will be very off.
My guess is they want to address that isolation aspect by making it feel better to interact with others, bringing more people together in the VR space.
But this is me interpreting your "the isolation it brings with it" as people just exploring VR by themselves.
I mean the isolation of basically wearing a helmet for hours. It's exhausting to have your vision and hearing constrained to the digital world in this way for long periods of time. To me, VR is like a roller coaster. It's super fun but only in small doses.
Ah, thank you for clarifying that. While I haven't used VR much, that actually is one of the things I worry about the most: being so disconnected from my physical environment. But I'm also a person who doesn't like walking down the street with earbuds in, preferring to hear what's going on. I wonder how much people will vary in their willingness to dive into VR (and disconnect from their physical surroundings).
Yeah, I'm a VR nerd but I now find that wearing a VR helment for too long creates a kind of existential loneliness that will be hard to solve with better technology.
It really depends on the game. I was playing H3VR, and definatley experienced that dreadful isolation feeling as I was out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fake unliving things. But in multiplayer games like Onward Its provided the opposite feeling for me. My wife and kids left for a week, and I work from home... after a few days, it felt like hanging out with friends.
