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by rsynnott 1466 days ago
"[Thing A] was bad once, and now everyone uses it, thus everyone will use [Thing B], because Thing B is currently bad", is not, generally, a great argument. For instance, take 3D TVs; those were _not_ good (though they were far more mature than current VR stuff) or, as it turned out, of particular interest to the general public, and now they're gone.

While I can't predict the future, I tend to think that VR is more of a 3D TV situation than a smartphone situation; an industry which is hitting market scaling issues ("Argh! Everyone in the world has a HD TV/Facebook account!") is pushing a new thing, to expand its market, and it's not particularly clear that consumers want it. This all feels very top-down; giant companies deciding what consumers will want next, and telling consumers they want it. This works less often than you'd think.

Now, this eventually worked for the TV industry with 4K and particularly HDR, but those were both less jarringly different from what people were used to, and had more creative support (your average film director was much more excited about HDR than 3D...)