If you read 'Count Zero', one of the ideas there is that going online into a 3D chat didn't really catch on until there were realistic human faces. One of the

If you read 'Count Zero', one of the ideas there is that going online into a 3D chat didn't really catch on until there were realistic human faces. One of the characters in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson mentions that accurate modelling of human facial expressions was a key component in the success of that world's VR environment. Fictional anecdotes are even less like data than real-life anecdotes, but I think it says something that when humans try to annotate text with emotions, faces are the closest graphical analogue: :) :( O_o