Looking at some avatar that distinctly isn't you I presume?

Because a video (no matter how good) of you wearing a pair of displays on your face is decidedly not as good as just video chatting.

What specific experience is benefited by communicating in this way over just video or voice chat?

It is ridiculous beyond belief, it's getting to Kurzweil levels of "woooo, the future"

Here's a reply to another thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496786

TIL one of the buzzwords that makes people really lose grasp of reality is VR.

That sums up my sentiments exactly.

But just to add, I've already owned a VR headset 20 years ago. Ok the screens were 320x240 but the resolution wasn't the downside, it was the neckache from wearing the damn things.

I've also got some NVidia 3d shutter glasses. You can play any OpenGL or DirectX game with them. They are great fun and really enhance a game. I've already played Everquest in 3D. (Although Dungeon Keeper 2 is my favourite, you can go into first person mode as a fly was wander round your dungeon - I've spent hours doing that).

3D porn is great also, I can recommend that.

I've not tried an Oculus but it looks like a neckache device to me.

I'm not sure what it is about VR that short circuits people's brains and they lose all concept about how things still have to work in the physical world.

I mean, can you really see a fashion conscious teenager coming home to chat with their friends looking like this? http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/images/manampli...

There's lots of issues with VR, it's definitely got some cool potential, and I've seen some really nice applications of it over the years.

One of the problems I remember from the 90s was the disembodiment problem. You can't see where your hands and arms are (even if proprioception informs you where they should be). Some versions tried to map your virtual body to your real body, but it's never the same and the illusion breaks. Other cases just ignored it, but then you're left fumbling for control surfaces you can't see. It's an uncanny valley you can't overcome unless you track every part of every limb and map it to a realistic simulacrum in the virtual space.

Haptics and feedback then become the next problem and on and on and on, there's a very long stream of issues that need resolution before it comes close to what people think they are fantasizing about in their heads. 3d head tracking goggles are the simplest problem to solve in this equation.

The goggles I had were head tracking which I found worse than the shutter glasses for the reasons you allude to. In RL when I look to the left I don't just move my head, I move my body, chang emy feet, move the weight of myself around ready to act. I've now to move my control equipment to orientate myself ready for action. It just doesn't work.

It's why Wii games are not FPS shooters, they are stand and slash and they only have control to deal with.