[This story from The Times provides insights into how and why people are increasingly using virtual reality (and presence) to meet and date romantic partners. See the original version for nine more (large, vivid) pictures. I particularly like this comment that suggests the ubiquity of presence in modern lives: “Hamilton and Harrison got engaged in Kyoto in June, and are now planning their wedding — maybe at Disney World, in real life, if Disney World counts as real life.” –Matthew]

[Image: The British filmmaker Joe Hunting met his girlfriend, Jenny, while making the first commercially distributed feature film shot entirely in VR]

They fell in love in virtual reality. Now they’re together in real life

Meet the couples who met by dating in VR — which is only going to get more common with Meta’s launch of the Quest 3S headset on Tuesday

By Harriet Alexander
October 14 2024

When the gregarious Texan describes meeting the Japanese anime fan, it seems so simple.

He worked in a tech store, and was introduced to a recent graduate from the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design, by mutual friends. They hit it off immediately, chatting for hours.

“Codi was ranting about the possibilities of tech, all these ambitions,” she recalled. “I thought: this guy is crazy!”

But the baseball cap he was wearing during their first encounter was not real and she wasn’t just an anime fan — she appeared to him as an actual animated anime girl.

Codi Hamilton and Marina Harrison met in virtual reality (VR) — putting on headsets and entering an arena of infinite possibilities. The couple are part of a growing trend for real-life relationships to begin not just online, but virtually.

And it’s only going to get more common. On Tuesday, Meta — maker of the most widely-used VR headsets — will launch the Quest 3S, retailing at $300. The S on the new model stands for “start’ — it’s seen by Meta as a way of introducing people to VR.

The Quest 3, launched in October last year, was $500, and the Quest 2 was $1,500.

Apple also launched a high-end headset this year, the Vision Pro, but the $3,499 price tag put it beyond the reach of many. Sales figures have not been reported, but Bloomberg said that fewer than 500,000 were expected to be sold this year.

By contrast, in the eight months after its launch Quest 3 sold an estimated one million headsets, while Quest 2, launched three years before, has sold somewhere around 20 million.

Quest 3S is expected to outsell them all, meaning that this brave new world is becoming accessible to more and more people. And that world is about to turn even more real. Meta says it has improved a feature called “passthrough”, which allows users to see a real-time view of their surroundings, blurring the line between VR and reality.

Hamilton, 30, said the model would be a game-changer. “This will introduce more people into virtual reality, considering that the biggest issue is the price point,” he said. “A more affordable headset will likely sway a lot of people to try VR for the first time.”

Hamilton and Harrison run a business organising parties in VR, where performers entertain audiences with acrobatics, pole dancing and DJ sets, all in their own homes. People can go on VR “dates” to theme parks, bars and landmarks around the world, or get married in virtual ceremonies. Some even spend the night sleeping with their headsets on, although most said the contraptions were too cumbersome to be comfortable enough to doze off.

VRChat, the most common platform for socialising, launched in 2014 and said it had more than 100,000 users online during peak hours.

Anyone at home can put on their headset, choose their avatar and strike up conversation, with the headset picking up the user’s real voice. Encounters can be bizarre — think a banana and a dragon sitting in a woodland glade putting the world to rights — but also touching. Deaf people, wearing sensors attached to their hands, can converse in sign language with others across the globe; the shy can come out of their shells; housebound individuals can travel the world.

In the southwestern United States, “Dusty”, a belly dance teacher, borrowed her housemate’s VR headset and instantly fell in love with it. “I was never into technology or gaming before,” she said. “It was a steep learning curve.”

She eventually discovered people dancing in some of the VR worlds, and as a belly dancer she was instantly hooked. She bought a full body set from Craigslist with trackers the size of your palm attached to shoes, elbows, waist and chest.

Dusty, 32, noticed that most VR dance classes were for hip hop or lap dancing, so she started giving belly dancing lessons. The platform does not have a way of monetising experiences, so she created a website where for $20 a month users could enter the oasis she designed for Sunday afternoon lessons, and gyrate among sand dunes on magic carpets.

It was while at a VR dance event in 2019 that she met a Canadian man who went by the name Toaster. “He was really good at expressing himself through his body movement,” she said. “I was instantly attracted to how he moved. And also, his avatar was kind of cute.”

The pair began chatting outside of VR and a year later he travelled to the United States to meet her. Dusty now lives in Canada with Toaster, navigating the highs and lows of transitioning from a VR relationship to “IRL”.

“Obviously there’s really good parts, because you get to do things that you did in VR in real life,” she said. “For example, we just recently went to a carnival and did rollercoaster rides. We get to see movies together in the theatre. Before, we used to watch it online together at the same time, or in VR. And then of course, the physical romance is actually there. You’re not hugging or kissing the air.”

The couple are also trying to get used to the trickier parts of being in a relationship. “If you got in a fight, you could just hang up and leave. Here you’re stuck in the same house, so you have to work it out.”

Despite finally being together, the pair still go on VR dates, where they sit in separate rooms in their house, drink in hand, socialising with others around the world. “When we have to refill our drinks, we’ll take our headsets off and meet in the kitchen, refill our drinks, gossip and then go back to VR,” Dusty said.

One of their good friends is the British filmmaker Joe Hunting, who met his girlfriend, Jenny, while making the first commercially distributed feature film shot entirely in VR.

Hunting, 25, has now moved from his home in Epsom, Surrey, to California to be with Jenny.

“I feel that a lot of people in VR find the confidence in presenting a really authentic part of their joy,” Hunting said. “So you get to know someone for almost the person they want to be, and a really authentic, happy part that they can express without having any sort of barriers or a physical judgment.”

The pair noticed a growing connection while editing his film We Met in Virtual Reality, which premiered at Sundance and was released on HBO in 2022.

“We got very lucky, I guess, because when we both saw each other there was an immediate attraction,” he said.

They spent Christmas 2021 “together” in VR — Hunting laughs when asked if this means he sat at the dinner table with his family, wearing a headset.

“I was with my family all day, but because of the time difference — she was in California, I was in the UK — I saw Jenny in the evening,” he said. “My family has been really supportive of my filmmaking in VR. I’m very transparent, so I was telling them about what I was experiencing with Jenny and navigating that. They were sceptical a little bit because it’s still new, but also really excited, and have been very supportive ever since we’ve been together.”

Hunting thinks that VR dating remains in the early stages, but is here to stay. “I think people meeting online is only going to grow,” he said. “And virtual reality will just be another cog in the machine.”

Andrew Weinreich is not so sure. Dubbed “the father of social networking”, he founded an online platform, SixDegrees, which predated Facebook by seven years. In 2006 he created a dating app, MeetMoi, which was sold to Match.com in 2013.

Weinreich said he thought that augmented reality (AR), rather than virtual reality, will be the future of dating — with an event where users don AR glasses to see labels above someone’s head disclosing their availability or interests.

But Jessica Alderson, co-founder of the dating media company So Synced and chairwoman of the Online Dating and Discovery Association, said she found people running away from tech.

“The dating apps have grown super fast for a long time. And that level of growth just isn’t sustainable,” she said. “I think there is movement at the moment towards in-person, early-on connections — curated dinners, singles events. That can be quite efficient, rather than endless scrolling and matching and chatting online. I guess the novelty has worn off a bit.”

But for a growing number of people, VR seems to be the answer.

Hamilton and Harrison got engaged in Kyoto in June, and are now planning their wedding — maybe at Disney World, in real life, if Disney World counts as real life.

VR brought them together, but they — like all the couples The Times spoke to — caution that real-life connection is invaluable, and needs to be established early on.

“I think there would be a side of me that said, I’m here for who she is,” Hamilton said. “But I’d be lying to myself if I said how she looked in the real world was irrelevant.”

And he worried that some may get too sucked into their virtual existence.

“While VR is an amazing tool to cross planets and meet people, there is a real world that exists,” he said. “A lot of people ignore that and become so jaded. They forget that behind it all, there’s a real person.”