Reverend Conehead
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The more I hear about these VR headsets, the more I think I want one. My sister uses an Oculus Rift headset with various exercise apps. She has some kind of game that give her a good workout. She says it motivates her to keep doing it because it's a challenge, and that you can even compete with other people in the game over the Internet. Sounds like a good way to stick with exercise. I've also heard of AI-girlfriends. I personally don't think that some kind of supposed relationship with a VR app could substitute for a real person. However, I thought of one reason why it might be cool. An AI "girlfriend" who can speak French would allow me to practice my French every single day. Currently, I video conference with people in other countries to practice my French. It's helped me to get a lot better. However, if I could talk with an AI person every single day in the language, I would progress even faster. When I learned German, I went on exchange programs to Switzerland and to Germany. It made me need to speak in German every single day, and that got me really, really good at it. There are programs like that for adults, but good luck finding a way to take 6 weeks off your job to do something like that. If an AI person could converse in French convincingly like a real person, that would be huge. Even if I only spoke in the language for 30 minutes each day, that would be a huge help. Maybe they even have apps that teach you a language. I've wanted to learn Spanish for ages. While I don't feel the need to have some computer app tell me she "loves" me, the foreign language practice sounds like a cool idea. And there are probably VR apps designed specifically to teach you vocab and grammar. And if the VR headset could speak to me in Swiss-German, that would be huge. When French and Standard German, I run into people from time to time who speak those languages. The same is not true of Swiss-German. I don't get to practice that dialect much, so my Swiss-German isn't anywhere near as good as my French or Standard German. If my AI "girlfriend" could speak with me every day in both Swiss-German and French, that would be cool.
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I'm pretty sure my sister's Oculus Rift doesn't have to be plugged into a PC. The apps just install into the headset, which is its own computer. You can't, in real life, hop in a spaceship and explore the solar system, but maybe that's possible in VR. It would also be cool to scuba dive down to the Titanic, something that's also impossible in real life, but could happen in VR. If anyone here has a VR headset that you like, I would love to hear your impressions of it.
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I'm pretty sure my sister's Oculus Rift doesn't have to be plugged into a PC. The apps just install into the headset, which is its own computer. You can't, in real life, hop in a spaceship and explore the solar system, but maybe that's possible in VR. It would also be cool to scuba dive down to the Titanic, something that's also impossible in real life, but could happen in VR. If anyone here has a VR headset that you like, I would love to hear your impressions of it.