[hinkley]

No. You're seeing a low adoption rate and imagining that it's just the typical adoption cycle taught in Business 101.

VR has been the next big thing for twenty years. It's not a niche technology because of Luddites, it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology and only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it. You're targeting an audience of people who find your product merely tolerable.

And since there are no social constructs or visual cues around this division of humans, you'll never get a network effect like you might with, for instance, a pair of pants designed for very tall people.

[roninb]

I may be too young to recall, but I seem to remember 30+ year olds complaining about how touch screens would never catch on around 2005-06. Something about the masses never accepting a product that's "merely tolerable."

I recall the same about the size of a phone in hand a few years after that and we haven't seen a sub-5" phone really sell well in how long?

[marcelluspye]

I remember showing some of my A.V. club buddies my Note 2 not long after it came out and getting laughed at. "It's like holding a magazine to your head!"

Without changing phone size, most of my friends now have bigger or equal sized phones, and I've gotten at least one 'you told me so' since then.

[arcanus]

> it is a niche technology because it works against human physiology

I'm not sure I agree. Many complained of motion sickness playing early FPS games, such as DooM or Descent. I wouldn't be surprised if it just takes an equilibration period to get used to the devices. Either way, unless there is actual research that shows a large portion of the population actually has difficulty adapting to the device, I don't believe the tech is fundamentallying flawed.

[pekk]

There are plenty of people who just can't play first-person 3d games without puking. They didn't get used to it, they just avoid those games and the market doesn't care. Even games which could be modified to prevent motion sickness typically aren't.

[marcelluspye]

This doesn't seem quite right either, though. People had been talking about 'virtual reality' for a long time, but only recently has there been so much activity in trying to make available to consumers. It's true that a non-trivial amount of people experience motion sickness, but I'd hardly call the people who use it without such issues the 'lucky few.'

[Suttonian]

I think you are talking about sickness when you are talking about human physiology.

>only a lucky few are totally unaffected by it

That is true, but what you aren't covering here is that when software (and hardware) is properly designed, almost no one is affected by it! Vive games with physical locomotion do not have complaints of sickness.

[intrasight]

Personal Computers had a 15 year adoption cycle. VR will be even longer. We don't really know who is affected or unaffected by it. Only a few dozen people have used real VR on a regular basis. By "real" VR I mean a facility with at least a $M price tag. Let's assume that this raises the percent who find it utterly tolerable to 50%. That's still way higher than the rate for amusement park rides - which is a multi-billion dollar business.