Today, I laughed in virtual reality for the first time.

It wasn't even a good joke — some throwaway jab about the Taylor Swift video that was playing on the VR equivalent of a drive-in movie theater screen — but that didn't matter. A glossy, glowing, limbless robot avatar named JohnMossey laughed with me. It felt like telling a joke in a foreign language. The point at which your language comprehension tips over into something else and the thing that was unnatural becomes fluid. That's what laughing in VR felt like.

A new medium

I spend way more time thinking about the future of VR than I spend strapped into the sensory feeding trough of an Oculus. Gaming and high-end simulations (like virtually ascending the Wall from Game of Thrones) are cool, but they aren't what the big deal is. VR is much, much bigger than video games; a 3D virtual world will follow smartphones, and now "wearables," as the next platform. Those devices are interruptive in nature, pinging up with chirps and blips, VR is immersive — making it a very different beast.

If our attention spans are usually divvied up into innumerable split-second morsels (likes, favs, RTs), VR by definition commands our full attention. The thing is, I'm usually not willing to hang out in a virtual space for long. I like to get the gist of it and get out of there. This time, I didn't want to leave. And that's equal parts terrifying and totally awesome.

One company has a very different vision than the gamer broverse that VR can bring to mind. AltspaceVR isn't worried about building a metaverse for the time being; it just wants to create a thoughtful, artfully rendered communication platform where people actually want to hang out. "At some point theres probably going to be a VR operating system," Wooden said, trailing off a little.

"[VR] is a new medium; it's not an accessory," he said. Facebook bought the world's best-known VR company and yet we're still talking about gaming VR — not social VR. If Altspace's $5.2 million in funding from sources like Google Ventures, Tencent, and Dolby is any indication, that conversation is right around the corner.

"In VR, there's a lot of non-verbal communication that facilitates that connection," explained "Cymatic" Bruce Wooden, Altspace VR's head of developer relations. Unlike a third-person video game, or even a first-person role-playing game, in VR "you feel more attached to your avatar because you are inhabiting it."

Looking down, you see you.

Down the rabbit hole

Wooden was kind enough to drive down from Redwood City to meet me in a coffee shop in Santa Cruz. After securing a power strip, we chatted a little about his company before he eagerly started unloading the contents of the black backpack he carried. He was carrying around a whole virtual world, but unpacked it just looked like a Macbook Pro, a laptop stand, a Verizon MiFi, an Oculus DK2, and a pretty standard gaming mouse and headset. He smiled, casually popping the headset on like a diver might a mask, and seemed to say hi to someone.

I didn't really get it. Then he handed it to me.

Far from the jarring ready-set-go! of most VR experiences I've had, I looked around and found myself in a large, modern chamber with stone and wood paneling, with a virtually rendered print of a Japanese woodblock painting running down the wall to my right. Immediately I forgot about Bruce and the coffee shop I was in. There was someone else in the virtual room talking to me. AWall-E-inspired, glossy, benevolent-looking robot was talking to me. Turns out I was speaking in realtime with John Mossey, AltspaceVR's intern in Atlanta.

John didn't have arms or legs (those look weird rendered virtually, he tells me) but was a floating white humanoid that gently glowed blue as he talked. He showed me around the space, which was decorated with sofas, a large TV-like screen, and a big potted cactus that I accidentally teleported onto a time or two before I got the hang of moving around. To move around, I clicked the left mouse button and sort of warped to wherever I'd picked, though it was fluid and not at all disorienting.

In Altspace, much like in regular space, noises grew louder or softer as you moved toward or away from them. If John was across the room, he'd yell for me to hear him if I didn't move my own first-person view avatar closer. Turning right or left, the sound grew muffled, just like it would in real life.

Read the rest of this story at The Kernel.