> The biggest question is if VR can bridge the "uncanny valley" of video chat and other current technologies If they hit uncanny valley they’ve already put too

> The biggest question is if VR can bridge the "uncanny valley" of video chat and other current technologies If they hit uncanny valley they’ve already put too much realism in. Realism isn’t the issue... video chat fully photorealistic already and it doesn’t work. The issue is conversational cues. You need to be able to see where other people are looking. You need to be able to hear their breath and the non-word mouth sounds they make. You need to see gestures and posture changes. And you need to be able to see them for every person in the meeting simultaneously in 3D space. These are all well documented tells that we need in order to carry on a group conversation. The science on this subject is thoroughly studied. Getting an MVP in place doesn’t require photo realism. It probably does require full body tracking, more like Leap motion than Oculus Touch. It probably does require mics and headphones that are calibrated together and it probably does require specifically tuned audio codecs. It probably requires eye and face tracking equivalent to what Apple has on the iPhone X. But I doubt the uncanny valley will come into play. Animal heads like Apple already has might already be enough. None of the announced headsets will be able to do VR conferencing well, but I doubt we’re more than 5 years away from one that can. It’s mostly an integration problem at this point. With a lot of iterative design until people are like “yeah, that was a comfortable conversation! Weird but comfortable.”