I strongly feel that VR will help mitigate this problem. Location wouldn’t matter as much, and neither would busy schedules when “meeting up” would be as instant as a phone call. In fact, I was just playing VR ping pong with one of my best childhood friends who moved to Canada the other day. While not perfect, the sense of presence is way better than FaceTime or an audio call.
Prior to Apple’s vision reveal, VR’s largest problem is that most adults refused to even try it for both strange and valid reasons (“it’s stupid” “it’s too expensive” “it’s too complicated”). A lot of those reasons have been invalidated with meta’s quest. Standalone VR is the NES of our generation where you have a device that children just intrinsically understand while most adults either scoff at or ignore it. (This is apparent if you ever play an online VR game. Most of the users are children.) Of course, this was reality prior to Apple entering, so we’ll see what happens in 2025-2027 once Vision has more developers building for it and more units available to everyday people.
I used to never talk on the phone, but with a friend's help, I'll now call other friends and "hang out" on the phone with them after work, while I'm doing my dishes or on the treadmill. Sometimes I call them and they're not open to chatting, other times we talk for hours and just catch up. But that didn't just happen. I had to push through some really uncomfortable stuff, and my friends did as well.
VR is going to be another step, but Facetime is pretty great.
I’m not sure what the problem is. VR isn’t limited to “casual friends”. I don’t call my acquaintances either. I only use it with family or good friends.
Prior to Apple’s vision reveal, VR’s largest problem is that most adults refused to even try it for both strange and valid reasons (“it’s stupid” “it’s too expensive” “it’s too complicated”). A lot of those reasons have been invalidated with meta’s quest. Standalone VR is the NES of our generation where you have a device that children just intrinsically understand while most adults either scoff at or ignore it. (This is apparent if you ever play an online VR game. Most of the users are children.) Of course, this was reality prior to Apple entering, so we’ll see what happens in 2025-2027 once Vision has more developers building for it and more units available to everyday people.