Something that occured to me recently was the difficulty in conveying emotion or feeling. In the material world of course, we can display a bewildering variety of emotional states though the most minor movement of facial muscle, a tilt of the head, roll of the eyes...

Despite some clever efforts, I've not seen anything that really overcomes this. Thus we have text based 'emotes', that is, denoting some expression of state of feeling and setting it aside from your avatar's speech. This works generally well, but in a busy or heated discussion can often degenerate into those cute little combinations of characters we Gen X cynics used to be so annoyed by when they first started appearing on aunt Em's e-mails.

Voice chat is becoming more widely available, but has many limits. First of all, as a forty something, the idea of sitting in the home office and yakking away about fighting orcs in medievalese while my spouse sits in the next room doesnt appeal all the much.

What we need is to >think< and the avatar speaks, the gestures and facial tics are made. Not long ago, what was thought of as cutting edge VR was esentially an empty office building. Now I can go on Hajj in Second Life. Get busy programmers!

Finally- once I get this all sorted out on my iPhone I will post a lot more often and in-depth.

Good night and good luck!