And none of that requires virtual reality to do. You could have a video game with the characters matching your facial expressions. It would be just as pointless, but it could be done.
It doesn't explicitly require VR... but it does require having both "central vision" and "peripheral vision." Basically, to have the level of detail required to be able to read people's expressions off their avatars in a non-VR setup, you have to have their faces filling a large-enough degree of your vision that, in most setups, they're fullscreen on your monitor (you know, like Skype.)
To be able to interact with the world while talking to someone (because that's the reason you're in a virtual world rather than on Skype), you need to be able to see things going on around the person while focusing on them. So, you either need a grid of nine monitors, or this thing[1].
And you still can't have a natural conversation with more than one person (or especially express any status-regulation emotions involving looking at one person in preference to another) because tilting your head means you can't see the "central vision" part of your screen-wall any more.
If only there was some way for tilting or moving your head to just show you more of the virtual people and world around you, in a naturally-mapped way, you know?
