Nevermind that social VR still has years ahead of it before it’s a truly convincing tool for virtual meetings; Conde Nast is diving right in at the deep end and making people date each other inside virtual reality, and you can watch.
Virtually Dating is a new show for Facebook’s Watch platform that debuted earlier today. In it, two people are hooked up to HTC Vive headsets (no one tell Zuckerberg) and fitted with gear for full body tracking. Their faces are then photographed and pasted onto virtual avatars and the two then meet in virtual environments. Weirdly, the two people are actually in the same room (though they’re kept hidden from each other until their headsets are on). That kind of defeats the point of virtual dating, but never mind that; there’s hilarity to be had!
You can watch the entire first episode below. It doesn’t mess around; we get a quick introduction to John and Shelby, two young people in search of love. They’re then thrust into a virtual bar for awkward introductions before being whisked away to a spaceship and then onto the moon. They seem to be enjoying their time together, though that’s mostly thanks to them poking fun at the various bugs and visual glitches they’re confronted with.
John and Shelby are set up on a blind date that takes place in a virtual reality world set in outer space.
Posted by Virtually Dating on Tuesday, 29 August 2017
But do they fall for each other? Well I won’t spoil it for those that are able to bear the awfulness until the very end. It’s safe to say this isn’t the best example of the power of VR.
New episodes of the series will debut every Wednesday for the next four weeks (next weeks’ looks especially hilarious). Check out the trailer for the rest of the series below.
https://youtu.be/uRYHER_M0Oc
