Holographic communication through time and space has long been the ultimate science fiction dream of mankind. Just like people’s continuous pursuit of strong AI, those who are full of geek spirit will not be satisfied with the current form of online social networking. Now VR social is booming. What pain points can VR social solve?
1. For friends and loved ones
The first and easiest thing to think about is the communication problem between people with strong relationship in different places. The problem with traditional on-line social networking is that users can talk with social tools, but it is difficult to truly feel the emotional state of the counterpart in the other end of the PC or Phone. Even if video chat allows each other to see each other, the unnaturalness of the scene will bring unspeakable awkwardness. To put it bluntly, traditional online social interaction is in shortage of intimacy, and the lack of physical presence will diminish social interaction, which will easily hinder or even distort the conveyance of emotions.
And this is the pain point that face-to-face VR social can solve. In an ideal VR social application, our avatars can convey our facial expressions & body language, lovers can go on a date in the virtual world (such as watching a movie), and even use the avatar to perform some intimate actions such as holding hands and kissing. And friends can play light entertainment games such as board games through VR. For parents and children, they can also experience some new experiences other than routine chats, such as viewing albums through slideshows in a warmly decorated virtual room, which is different from traditional video conversations.
2. For Strangers
After solving the problem of communication between people who know each other, the other major development direction of VR social interaction is making friends with strangers. Existing stranger dating apps have many problems: fake public persona, encounter cheater who are chatting with many candidates at the same time, lack of interaction forms, too less focus, and so on.
In the VR world, you can not chat with tons of grils/boys at the same time, which makes the date more serious, filtering the cheaters who are flirting many people simultaneously. Firstly you can exchange basic information such as age, race, photo, hobby. Once both party accept each other and agree to meet virtually, the two can instantly enter a private virtual space, and the entertainment available anytime and anywhere in the virtual world can well help people avoid embarrassing ask-and-answer talks. They can can take some adventures together, watch movies together, or visit some astounishing tourist spots even in space.
Strangers can become familiar with each other as they had get involved overwhelmingly together with shared experience, and they invested their precious time to make sure they are serious about the relationship. They can learn the details about the lovers from the things they do together before they want to spend a long trip to meet in the real world.
