What is having dinner together if you didn’t even eat the same? And this is the most banal example I could think of.
I’d sooner become an actual hermit than to share a soggy McD burger over VR.
(Or people that are otherwise unable to find people they relate with irl, for whatever reason)
Of course its not the same as being in person. But it can be much closer than people realize.
As I said, eye-tracking will be built in, so there will be eye contact. The environment renderings and avatars will be realistic. You can already do really interesting interactions such as table tennis and tabletop RPG games such as Demeo.
All the robots and goggles can’t hope to recreate the real thing.
And this is way harder to solve than dinner.
VR socialization might not be great, but like the BigMac is to food it might be just good enough for many.