Bought a Vive and new RTX card the first week of realizing I’d be stuck at home for months. Almost all of the other headsets were (and still are?) sold out. I

Bought a Vive and new RTX card the first week of realizing I’d be stuck at home for months. Almost all of the other headsets were (and still are?) sold out. I bought in with the expectation that I could have a great social experience in virtual reality, but it really hasn’t met up to my expectations. Virtual reality is cool, but the VR social networks are really lackluster. First of all, the audience is typically very young. There are far more children than I had expected. Don’t expect to have a good conversation right off the bat, and it will take a while to find someone of similar age/maturity and interests. I’ve hopped around a bit between AltSpace and VrChat, and I think I prefer the AltSpace crowd a bit more. What I haven’t yet done is participated in structured events. Seemingly, you can find every thing from open mic night to meditation and movie night. I got really interested in this aspect by watching a channel on YouTube called Disrupt. (The same guy who spent a week in VR) I think I’m going to give bigscreen a try tonight with the premiere of Jackass 3 in 3D. Being generally new to VR, I largely thought the claims of motion sickness were overblown, but quickly realized how fatiguing VR really is. As far as socializing these days, I’ve found luck with good old plain video chat. None of my friends have heavily invested in VR yet, but we still manage to hop on multi-hour long video chats and catch up on things or work on projects. And as far as meeting new people, I’ve found luck in playing team based mmos in my free time. You’d be surprised how well a common objective can do you in meeting new people. Once you find team members you like, stick with them. Steam and Discord is particularly good at this. I also think that’s the failure of social networks in VR. Without a common objective or expectation, it’s really hard to have a good conversation. At least in a game, you can always resort to talking about strategy and the like. Conversation usually comes naturally after. My take here is that VR is only really a good medium for interacting with people you already know, but this requires buy-in among your existing friends. Meeting people in VR is much less satisfying than traditional routes.