FWIW I think software is going to accelerate in sophistication far far quicker than hardware. It's just much easier / quicker / cheaper to iterate code. So good sex-robots are science fiction but a virtual girlfriend is not - I can use chatGPT on a pretty human and intuitive level already and this is just the first year of public availability. Haptics will continue to be expensive and cumbersome, and frankly kind of shit for many years. We don't even have good VR treadmills yet. Maybe the chip-in-brain thing will get to convincing body immersion before haptics.
Also in hardware, we're still so far away from lifelike visuals, in terms of resolution, field of view and especially ability to focus, not to mention size / weight of the headsets. So I think there will be a massive imbalance between hardware and software so that the "next big thing" like a virtual GF will be high tech data and low tech hardware, like in the movie "Her", a convincing person on your phone with a thoroughly disappointing level of physical immersion. In terms of VR, we may move away from cameras aside from initial high res scanning of models and into entirely CG, with viewer interaction, and if so there's going to be those early years of complaints as companies like SLR make uncanny valley CG scenes before the tech matures into absolute realism. On the plus side, if and when this tech is perfected, models will have infinitely long careers and we won't lose them to Onlyfans 🙂
