https://medium.com/super-ventures-blog/will-mixed-reality-replace-phone-calls-29b1feb2c62a

In the summer of 1995 I was lucky enough to participate in an amazing event that changed my life forever. As I put on a Virtual Reality (VR) head mounted display at the University of Washington I was virtually transported from Seattle across the Pacific to join other people in a small virtual tea room in Japan. I could talk to the others in the room, turn to look at them with my virtual face and wave at them with a disembodied virtual hand. This was the HIT Lab’s Greenspace project [1] and it was the first time that VR had been used to create a trans-pacific shared virtual world.

At the time the hardware cost over a million dollars and the communications bill for the few days the link was open was tens of thousands of dollars. Now, twenty years later, VR conferencing is becoming more commonplace. Companies such as High Fidelity, Sansar and Facebook are all developing collaborative VR spaces. Altspace VR regularly has over 30,000 monthly active users of its shared VR platform, and collaborative VR applications like Rec Room and Big Screen are growing in popularity.