VRChat is, in a very real sense, what “Future Internet” was depicted as in a lot of video games intended to be other-than-serious about it: instance-based virtual spaces, which people experience by strapping various amounts of computer equipment to themselves.

These games typically give virtual spaces equal billing to physical spaces, and I think that is, ultimately, correct. In real-time virtual spaces of any sort, individual people are experiencing the same event, synchronously, from their individual perspectives, and those perspectives are themselves represented in those spaces by the way each individual’s avatar is represented in that space.

Sometimes that’s easy to lose sight of: it’s easy to take off the VR headset and remember that you’re still in your computer room and you didn’t really go anywhere, and forget that, in many important ways, the VR shared space was adequately real: it was a sincere interaction in real-time with other people having a complementary experience. It was mediated via motion capture, 3D modeling, and VR headsets, but those are implementation details.