There's a moment in most video calls that veteran remote workers recognize immediately: the slight lag, the audio that arrives just out of sync with the mouth movement, the sensation that you're watching a broadcast rather than being with someone. The feeling of presence is fragile. VR and AR are built on the premise that it doesn't have to be. Marcus here — and the technology is finally at a point where the premise deserves serious examination.

Presence Is Stranger Than It Sounds

Psychologists use the term "presence" to describe the subjective sense of being in a place or with a person, as distinct from simply receiving information about them. You can read a letter from someone you love and receive real emotional content. But presence involves something additional — the felt sense that the other person is actually there, that you share a space, that your actions and theirs are happening in the same moment and same location. This feeling is not a simple function of fidelity. High-quality video doesn't automatically produce it. What produces presence, research suggests, is a combination of spatial continuity (feeling that you and the other person occupy related physical positions), responsiveness (the sense that your actions affect their experience in real time), and peripheral immersion (enough sensory input that your brain stops noting what's absent). VR, when it works, targets all three simultaneously.

What Current Research Shows

A study from University College London's Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics lab found that shared virtual environments significantly increase the sense of co-presence compared to video calls, particularly in tasks requiring collaboration and social coordination. Participants in VR felt more like they were working together rather than working in parallel. The effect was strongest for people who had not met in person — for them, shared VR was measurably better than video at building the sense of genuine social connection. AR points toward a different set of possibilities: rather than placing two people in a shared virtual space, it places a virtual representation of one person into the other's physical space. The appeal is that you get the familiarity of your own environment with something approaching the spatial relationship of in-person presence. Early research suggests AR representations can trigger some of the same social cognition processes as in-person presence — eye contact feels more natural, and the sense of shared attention is easier to establish than through a flat screen.

The Distance Between Promise and Reality

Here's where honesty is required. Current consumer VR headsets produce presence in some contexts and break it in others. The hardware is heavy, the resolution is imperfect, facial expressions are still largely absent or artificially reconstructed, and the physical awkwardness of wearing a headset introduces social costs that conventional video calls don't. For short-duration professional collaboration — a design review, a training session, a team brainstorm — the case is fairly strong. For extended social interaction, the current technology asks users to tolerate real discomforts in exchange for benefits that are real but partial. The gap closes a little with each hardware generation, but it's not closed yet.

The Tangent About Touch

The deepest limitation of both VR and AR isn't visual or audio fidelity — it's haptics. Human presence is substantially tactile. The sense that someone is truly with you is partly registered through touch: a hand on a shoulder, a hug, the shared weight of sitting on the same couch. VR can produce visual and audio presence. It cannot yet produce touch presence at meaningful fidelity. Haptic gloves exist, but they're still far from the experience of actual contact. This gap matters more than most VR promotional material acknowledges.

What the Next Iteration Might Unlock

The technology trajectory points toward lightweight mixed-reality glasses, more accurate full-body avatars driven by AI reconstruction from limited sensor data, and haptic feedback that handles at least some low-fidelity touch simulation. If those converge in the next five to seven years — a plausible timeline based on current development pace — the experience of being with someone at a distance will be qualitatively different from what it is today. Not identical to in-person presence. But different enough from current video that it may produce meaningfully different social outcomes: more sustained attention, more genuine emotional exchange, more of what we're actually reaching for when we close the laptop and wish we could just be in the same room.