I saw the future of social networks in VR, and it makes me impatient with VR as a I know it.

The Neural Lace Talks is a podcast about Science and Technology.
Main website http://vrma.io Contact via micah@vrma.io
I want those features, I want to customize my own world with the greatest ease, and share it with the same ease.

I’m not talking about the mythical 3rd kind of VR headset device annouced at OC3 this past year. A hybrid of mobile and desktop VR. I’m talking about a new software paradigm. A new social network, and a new concept for social networking in VR itself, for all the VR platforms, new ideas to run on all of them.

Written by Micah Blumberg, VRMA Virtual Reality Media http://vrmawork micah@vrma.work

VR is still not yet a product that I can use everyday, and I write about VR.

I have had many emotional ups and downs with VR, I went through a period of time when I just started to hate it, and I real thought that I would stop writing about it.

Oh the irony of getting sick of VR when your job is sort of like depending on the growth of the VR industry.

So right now I have a VR Ready laptop that totally rocks. It’s the Razor 14 inch pc with the touchscreen and 1 terabyte SSD. It cost me about $3000 dollars.

Because I am a VR developer, besides being a reporter, I have both the Oculus and the Vive, I also have a Hololens and it is a damn shame that I haven’t bothered to get a daydream or a Playstation VR system.

PS VR is good and decent as VR experiences go. Don’t start with Resident Evil 7, start with something like that mech warrior sports game, what was that called?

It’s amazing how with low latency, accurate and fast head and hand tracking, 120 frames per second (because of reprojection technology which is really creating an average extra frame between every two frames sent from the Playstation (4 or Pro) VR can be really great.

A friend of mine, who works at Qualcomm showed me a product he built in his garage basically. It was an extremely cool product and when I saw it I was like “holy #$%” that is social networks in VR, that is the future. What he also showed off to Facebook, and social networks like Facebook this week was a new product that is clearly the future of social in VR.

I don’t exactly know how my friend is going to get funded, whether facebook buys him or some other social network buys him or whether he goes it alone and creates a disruptive new social network that is Virtual Reality for the mainstream, like I am believing that he is going to achieve that dream.

So while I ponder that I think about how disatisfied I truly am with all the apps that have come out in the past year in summary, I am truly dissappointed in the entire VR industry, why is it that I have no productivity apps on my Oculus Rift with Touch controllers? Why is it that there is no Trello or Pinterest or Snapchat or Instagram of Virtual Reality. Why is there no Twitter of VR?

Where is my VR slack?

The most I can do is besides games is make art, and what drives me nuts about the games, as good as they are, is what I can’t do with them, like why isn’t the computer in the science fiction VR app as good as my own computer? Why can’t I shrink myself, or position myself closer to the floor, or just like start customizing an area, like creating my own content, mapping my two dimensional software programs to a 3D interface of my choosing and my customization settings.

Where is my windows holographic interface to the entire computer in VR.

Bigscreen was the closest software that got me to that. Envelope VR was a good idea but that’s not what I want.

I’m looking to dive further into using Unreal Engine Editor in VR, and Unity editor in VR to satisfy that burning need in me to create and customize the virtual environments to my liking.

Like what if I just built my own world out of Unreal Engine, and then like brought all my computer data into that world, and created new tools to use my data from inside a world of pure data.

I guess the reason I haven’t bought a Playstation VR for myself is that I am just going nuts with the idea of VR for gaming. I hate that idea, I don’t want to play games in VR, I mean that’s not so bad, but wait, where is that essential social element to videogames?

It is really awesome that VR is becoming much more social, and incorporating a lot of multiplayer aspects to games, but I’m saying that the social element is even more important than games itself.

Why is it that I can’t drive my Oculus Avatar into a meeting place, a virtual online community? That is what the Avatar system is about right? Maybe I haven’t found that app yet, but what about all my friends with the HTC Vive (I also have one) how are they going to connect with me on the Oculus app?

Facebook as a company can’t really be thinking about narrowly creating a social network that is only for the Oculus Rift users and ignore the Vive, PSVR, Daydream, Hololens, and other competing headware systems.

You can’t win the future of social networking if you are not ready to bring in VR users from any device to your social network.

So yeah, I think I have experienced the future of Social Networking in Virtual Reality, and I can’t tell you about it, not because I’m under NDA, but because I’m a good friend, and I’m going to let my friend be the first to tell you about his new app.

But it won’t be long, until you are using it anyways.