Facebook Spaces was announced at the social network’s F8 conference as a way of blending social media and virtual reality. If you own an Oculus Rift (and Touch controllers), you and four friends can enter a virtual world and hang out together.

Unfortunately, hanging out mostly constitutes of chatting, taking “selfies*” and enjoying the virtual world around you. Oh, and it’s not you, per se, but a cartoon caricature that you control; a dead-eyed digital mannequin that smiles blankly at everyone in the desperate hope that you won’t find it creepy.

Unfortunately, Spaces falls into the same trap that so many other platforms have over the years, assuming that people want the digital world to be a surrogate for the real. And that people have the time and energy to sit around talking to a cartoon with their friend’s voice through thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

Whenever a high-minded tech company makes proclamations about the future of social interaction, I’m reminded of Second Life. Founded more than a decade ago, the title was an open world platform that enabled strangers across the world to come together. It was touted as a digital utopia, a place where you were free to create whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, however you wanted. Your digital avatar could even fly around the Second Life universe, interacting with people from across the globe.

But in reality, this utopianism was misplaced, and the environment, even during its boom years, was stale and empty. People weren’t all that into into communicating with each other, and the platform gradually became a space for people to develop weird forms of architecture. It became little more than a proto-Minecraft, a gallery space or weird and wonderful designs that few would ever notice. Second Life itself still exists, of course, with around 600,000 monthly active users.

A big part of the internet’s job is to bring people together in ways that we wouldn’t — couldn’t — have conceived a few generations ago. We can now learn so much from people all across the globe and share their experiences, dreams and knowledge. Real-time chat platforms, from IRC to FaceTime, have enabled us to gradually bridge the physical distances that separate us. Still, none are a substitute for real human interaction, face to face, in the real world.

Facebook Spaces, on the other hand, places two more barriers between us and our friends: the bulky VR headset and the digital avatar. Then there are the constraints that Facebook places upon its users. At the moment, Spaces users can’t express sadness or anger. The likelihood of this becoming the new normal for social interactions is about as likely as Disney’s recently shuttered Club Penguin becoming the new Facebook.

Facebook is asking us to take a chunk of our most precious commodity — our attention — and give it entirely to its virtual world. But that world is one step removed from that of the internet, full of (literally) fake people in a fake place. In the demo video, friends gather together a surprise birthday party to take a selfie of themselves on an imaginary boardwalk.

But where is the reality and authenticity in you, and three other people, taking an image of some cartoon avatars in a virtual world? Will you expect that future historians will unearth these images and marvel at the experiences that you pretended to have?

I wonder if I’m wrong, and that people will embrace this in the same way that they have taking pictures from inside video games. But then that, at least, shows a journey that you’re going on — and an appreciation of a particularly engaging sight that’s been created within the game. Imagine the reaction of your friends and family when you show them your vacation shots from the Grand Canyon that you didn’t visit.

Even Mark Zuckerberg knows that Facebook’s Social VR demo, as it is, not the future of how we’re going to interact with one another. Both this year and last, the CEO showed off a rough idea for an augmented reality platform that could work in a pair of glasses. There, you’d never need to buy a TV, just use the AR overlay in the lenses on conjure one up on the wall of your otherwise sparse living room.

Unfortunately, that idea is nowhere near ready for the real world, and Facebook VP Deb Liu told the AP that the journey to that hardware was “just one percent finished.” Imagine, rather than exchanging time-sucking pleasantries with a cartoon avatar while standing on a fake mountaintop, having someone sitting on your couch next to you.

You’d be able to speak to them as if they were in the room, despite being on the other side of the world. But with this (almost) real interaction, you would have real eye contact, real body language and all of the other things that we, as humans, need in order to feel comfortable interacting with one another.

The software and hardware just isn’t there for this sort of platform, and probably won’t be for a very long time. But that, not Facebook Spaces, is the vision of social VR that I can get behind.

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* Technically not a selfie, since it’s not the person taking a photo.

I had the chance to try out Spaces for myself a few hours after it was announced at F8. As soon as I placed the Oculus Rift headset on my head and the Touch controllers were in my hands, I was transported to what appeared like a beautiful park with cherry blossom trees. On my right was my virtual helper, Justin, who appeared in the form of an animated cartoon avatar. In front of me was a tableau of sorts, with a little dashboard in front of me.

Justin told me to select Appearance, and voila, I could customize the appearance of an animated cartoon avatar of myself. You could design one from scratch by customizing individual features like your nose or your hair, but I decided to just have one automatically generated for me. I grabbed one of my profile photos, which were already on display, and Spaces was smart enough to translate it into a cartoon version of me. From there, I also changed the color of my glasses and my shirt, which you can do in the Appearance tab too.

What I noticed almost immediately is how real it seemed, which is really weird considering I was speaking to an animated avatar. Mike Booth, the product manager leading the Spaces development team, says that’s because the Rift and the Touch creates a little motion capture studio. “You get your actual body language,” he said. “It captures head movements, even hand gesticulation.”

What’s more, Spaces also infers what your eyes are looking at, creating what appears to be eye contact, which is integral to face-to-face communications. One of the reasons Spaces can do this so well is because these avatars are stylized and cartoon-like. “They’re not hyper-realistic, where you can find every little flaw,” says Booth.

The same goes with mouth movement. It actually listens to the voice coming through the Rift microphone and then it tries to guess what mouth shapes you’re making. It’s not always accurate — it sort of snaps the mouth around like a Wallace & Gromit cartoon — but that’s entirely on purpose. “We’re not trying to be super photorealistic,” says Booth. “We just want to show that you’re talking.”

There are other fun things you can do with your avatar too. If you point both thumbsticks up, your avatar will laugh. Point them out, and you’ll smile. Place both controllers on your face and you’ll make an “OH” face. Turn them outward, and your avatar will shrug and look confused. Gestures are basically to VR as emojis are to text. “You have to invoke them,” said Booth. “They’re not supposed to be accidental.”

Next, Justin showed me how to share different kinds of media. I could share photos and videos from my own album, or I could share ones from my newsfeed, or I could just share whatever on the web I found interesting. Once selected, I could resize them anyway I want and have them displayed in the background. What’s especially neat is that when you share 360-degree photos and videos, you can sort of throw them in the middle of the tableau and the image will completely envelop the world. It sounds sort of silly perhaps, but when Justin shared a 360-degree video of a CNN documentary of Iceland, I almost felt like we were right there, taking a tour of the glaciers.

You also have the option of using a marker to draw silly doodles, turning them into three-dimensional art. You can toss them around, make duplicates of them or just play silly games with them. And of course, I couldn’t not take a selfie. Yes, there’s a virtual selfie stick, and yes it works just as it sounds. Simply grab the selfie stick, frame the shot you want and snap the perfect shot. From there, you can share it with your friends just like you can with any other photo.

Last but not least, Spaces is also tied in with Messenger. So you can initiate video calls right when you’re in VR. Your friend’s video chat screen will show up in a little floating square (No, they don’t need a VR headset to participate) and only you can hear and see what he or she says — none of your other VR buddies can eavesdrop in the conversation. They can still hear what you say of course, but they can’t hear what your Messenger friend is saying. Facebook tells me there’s no way to enable that just yet, but that functionality might come later in the future.

As cool as all of that is though, what really sold me the most on Spaces are those animated avatars. And they also happen to be one of the factors that was really hard for Facebook to get right. “The biggest challenge was how the avatars were going to look,” said Booth. “You know the uncanny valley? Well the uncanny valley in VR is a lot wider. Anything that’s attached to your head is going to have biological motions; it’s going to seem alive.” That means that anything that was too life-like would look weird.

“Finding the right balance of charming and being human recognizably without being too realistic and creepy, was harder than expected,” said Booth. “One of our early experiments was to have the lips smoothly blend with the shapes, thinking it would be realistic. And it was just way too creepy.” There were also some experiments on non-human avatars, like you’d see on Zootopia, but that was nixed as well. “Facebook is about authentic identity, which is fundamentally about humans.” Still, that doesn’t mean that costumes won’t be an option later on.

“The core of Spaces, the reason it exists, is so you can feel like you’re in person with your friends,” said Booth. “And then it’s having interesting things you can do with your friends. It’s not a chatroom where you’re just talking.

Of course, Facebook Spaces isn’t the only social VR app out there. Oculus even has its own version called Oculus Rooms. The difference between the two, Booth says, is that Oculus’ version is made just for Oculus hardware and is made to drive that particular platform. Facebook Spaces, on the other hand, is supposed to be much more widespread. That’s why even though it’s an Oculus exclusive right now, Booth wants it to be on all VR hardware. Yes, even the Vive.

When I asked what Booth would say to the skeptics of social VR, he said he doesn’t quite know. But what he thinks would really happen, is that VR skeptics would finally be persuaded to use VR because of social. “There are people that are looking at VR, thinking it’s not for me, because they think it’s all about gaming,” he said. “But what we’re trying to build is for everyone.”

“We want to bring you and your friends to VR,” said Booth. “I hope it’ll make more people look at VR as someone that people will actually want.”

If there was still any question why Facebook paid all of that money for Oculus, today’s F8 keynote provided some extra explanation. From AR to social VR and more, the company laid out its plan for the immediate future that involves blending the virtual world with real life. If you missed the hour-long talk earlier today, don’t fret: We’ve compiled all the big news in a 10-minute clip.

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The full version of Workplace will be free until September 30th, but Facebook plans to charge a modest monthly rate of $3 per person for the first 1,000 people, $2 per person for the next 9,000 users, and $1 per person after that. Slack does offer 5GB of storage and service integrations with its free service, but you’re looking at a minimum of $6.50 per month for perks like additional storage or searching chat archives. That can add up quickly if you’re part of a large outfit.

Workplace is also getting bots that can automate tasks in group chats, such as ordering food for a long meeting or Lyft rides for the trip to an event. You’ll also have the option of broadcasting live video from pro equipment, such as a high-end camera at a presentation.

Should Slack be worried? That’s hard to say at this stage. Facebook’s name and resources will certainly get its foot in the door, but Slack has years of lead time and a presence on virtually every major platform. Also, some organizations may prefer Slack precisely because it isn’t Facebook. You don’t have to think about sharing your Facebook identity with your office, for example. It won’t be surprising if Workplace makes further inroads with its free tier, but it isn’t guaranteed to dominate.

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