The shelter-in-place order in response to Covid-19 has demonstrated both the necessity and insufficiency of virtual socialization. Technologies like Zoom and Skype (not to mention email) have allowed countless people to remain employed, to check in with each other, and to enjoy some diversion from the tedium of confinement.
But although most states are only in week three or four of “lockdown” I am already seeing accounts of people, particularly those who live alone, suffering emotional breakdowns as a result of their physical isolation. Seeing and hearing each other in real-time is a marvelous thing, but we apparently have a deeper need to be with other people.
Videoconferencing in 3D with goggles and headphones (i.e. VR) might one day become a viable way to fulfill that need. But it presents an additional hurdle: participants will have most of their faces covered by cumbersome equipment. One solution is for participants to represent themselves with 3D avatars.. But this detracts significantly from the verisimilitude of the experience, which was supposed to be the whole point.
What is less clear is whether people will care. Maybe feeling as if you’re around someone else, even if that someone looks like an obviously-fake 3D avatar, is still psychologically preferable to interacting with a video representation of a person, even a realistic one, if that representation must be mediated by a screen held at arm’s length.
Nadav Zohar 