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Oogh. I’ve been interested in VR since the Gen 1 Oculus Quest back in 2016. One of the biggest problems with social spaces in VR is that they try to reproduce face-to-face social venues like bars and nightclubs. But there’s no blood sugar hit, and no satisfaction, to virtual drinks and virtual food. So the experience is starting out lacking a key driver of sociability: people socialize better then they have a little drink, and a little nosh in their hands. Add that to the other compromises already inherent in the medium (no valid expressions, no proper eye gaze, lack of body language hints from no feet or interpolated lower bodies, etc.) and socializing in VR still falls flat most of the time.

And I say that as someone who owns and uses a Quest Pro, because it (finally!) gives better facial expressions and realistic eye gaze.

So kudos to food brands who are at least trying to figure out how to fill that gap.

However, the estimated 10-20% proportion of the population that suffers from Misophonia - an unbearable aversion to chewing, lip smacking, and other mouth sounds, and peoples total inability to be aware of when they should mute themselves, means that this needs a lot more thought.

The current generation of VR headsets all have mics that point straight down, directly at the mouth. Imagine having misophonia (2 of my friends do), and the sounds of someone unwrapping a burger and eating it from the folded-back wrapper: *shhhhhwrip, scrape, crinkle, chomp, chew-chew-chew, *smack*, swallow, sniff. All being beamed straight into your ears. And in those Meta Horizon spaces with everyone-can-hear-you turned on, beamed *straight into the space between your ears in your head*.

Uh, yeah, NO.

VR headsets need a self-mute that kicks in automatically with no pfaffing in menus when you touch your mouth, or when a bite or sip of something approaches your mouth.

Quest Pro and Quest 3 have a wide enough field-of-view downwards to support that detection and it’d be a short enough step to progress to auto-self-mute when you take a bite.

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