[eigenvekt]

This is just not my experience at all.

I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.

Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.

It was just absolutely nothing to do them.

Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.

With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.

[chaostheory]

According to the data, it’s children and tweens that dominate the MAUs. Also just read Reddit about complaints of most online VR games being dominated by children as a counter to your anecdote of one family.

[nostrademons]

"Most VR users are children" is a very different statement from "Most children are VR users." The former can be very true without the latter being true at all; it just implies that "most people are not VR users", which is also true.

[chaostheory]

You have a point, but my comment is better than an anecdote.

There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.

[nostrademons]

The market for VR headsets is worldwide, so the right denominator is the ~600B children in the developed world. If you generously figure that half of those headsets are used by children, that's ~2% penetration, which seems more like it.

20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.

[chaostheory]

That’s not a good way of framing it because the vast majority of the headsets were sold in the US. I would be surprised if there were even healthy sales in developing countries, so we shouldn’t be counting all of the children in the world. Not to mention that you probably have to exclude children under 10 give or take.

Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.