[makeitdouble]

By that token we had viable PDAs (Palm Pilot) since the late 90s and it took 2 decades to get smartphones. The first consumer level VR headset (the Rift CV1 ?) launched in 2016, so we're still less than a decade into it.

Comparing the windows CE devices we had in the early 2000s and the Quest 3 for instance, I think the stages are not that dissimilar: they require enough effort and compromises that the general public would not care, but there's actual real world use cases and enough companies willing to invest in the field and bringing incremental and not so incremental evolutions.

[kibwen]

You appear to be in violent agreement with the parent commenter. What everyone in this thread is saying is: VR might be big someday, but that won't be this year, or next year, or possibly even this decade or next decade.

To continue to use the PDA analogy, if you went back to the mid-90s and told people "these will be everywhere in 20 years!", people would still shrug their shoulders and go about their daily lives same as ever, because 20 years from now ain't today. And when it comes to VR, we're all shrugging our shoulders.

[makeitdouble]

I agree with your general take on the time line, but people mid-90s were definitely seeing where it was going. The move from phones in cars, to pagers, to cell phones, feature phones, and win CE phones happened in about a decade and some. That's enough evolution speed to understand that the next turn will happen within a few years.

The same way I think everyone sees smart glasses coming. We just have no idea which company will crack the nut, what will be the twist, and on what timeframe.