Oculus Rift - Online chat?

"stevevr" wrote:
...I tried finding VR-minded people in my local area and only found 3...

This made me laugh a little. Not in a mean spirited way but because a lot of us are still not realizing virtual reality is THE solution to this very problem of how to gather a wide-spread, yet subject-oriented community together to sit and talk (virtually) face to face.

VRChat is doing a great job of making this possible. VRChat (or other similar apps) as a virtual extension of a community forum like Reddit or Facebook could be THE application to take VR into the mainstream.

Granted, it's all still very rough around the edges, but I'm literally watching an evolution on a weekly basis.
Eventually, I see the perfect VR chat environment would have us all as individual avatars, custom designed with game-quality slider controls. Each of us would be able to load up our own pics, videos, music or data on our own personal floating screens. VR rooms will have "whiteboards" so we can all share our ideas in an interactive and cooperative way. Forums like this one will be incorporated into virtual chatrooms and become VR enabled so navigation will literally be like walking from one room to another. Voice recognition, speech to text, text to speech and translation software will make the language barrier a thing of the past. All the pieces exist. Someone just needs to assemble them.