I for one am amazed that "video game characters" are stuck in video games and don't come out in forms like:
* an assistant at the drug store that lives on the screen has the image of a body and can make eye contact with you
* a 3-d graphic performer that does a sketch comedy act with a human performer that is reflected into a mirror like "pepper's ghost"
Technologies that are ready to "break through" (like the internet in 1994) often exist at a mature level somewhere but haven't spread for some reason. For instance, this 1971 book
anticipated that cnn.com would exist around 1981; actually you could read news headlines on Compuserve. France had minitel, other countries had videotext, but there wasn't enough centralization in most places for large-scale online services to hit big until the technology had passed the threshold at which it could have worked by an order of magnitude.
I think it's because many engineers underestimate how much the force of habit shape people behavior.
habits that shape the consumer, employers, companies making decisions for automation.
maybe drug store managers would feel like they have no one to manage? it would be too disruptive for labor.
From a consumer perspective even available tech like voice recognition doesn't seem to add or change much for me personally like I know Siri is on my iphone right now, but how often do I feel comfortable speaking to her? almost never.Why would I speak if I could type?
Virtual game characters like assistants would look too odd and uncomfortable, except maybe in japan, it's uncomfortable to make eye contact with human strangers, let alone 'robot eyes stranger'!.
maybe if younger kids were exposed to virtual assistants they would be comfortable in adapting to them, just like gen z adapted to preferring typing over answering the phone.
maybe that could be the future of post-gen z generation.
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
anticipated that cnn.com would exist around 1981; actually you could read news headlines on Compuserve. France had minitel, other countries had videotext, but there wasn't enough centralization in most places for large-scale online services to hit big until the technology had passed the threshold at which it could have worked by an order of magnitude.
Then it went off like a bomb.