[api]

I think this is a niche technology that people keep trying to make go mainstream, but most people just don't want it. For most people (including myself) trying VR a little is a novelty, but it's not something I want every day, and AR seems like it'd be useless or annoying unless I were using it in e.g. some industrial context like a heads up display.

It's like NFTs in gaming, NFTs in general, AI shoehorned into places it doesn't make much sense, wifi connected can openers, Soylent, ...

Startup founders are always told that there must be market pull, and many startups fail because they try to push an idea nobody wants, but it's not just startups. Big companies and VCs do this too.

[Damogran6]

FWIW, with today's social media environment...I'm ACTIVELY managing the ways I'm interrupted. Having that in front of my field of view is a non starter.

I'm an early adopter, but even at that, I don't use VR a whole lot over the course of a month. It's a tech that people (nerds) really want to take off and it just hasn't. I'm not sure it will...it could be replaced with other equivalent technologies that aren't strapped to your face.

[gwervc]

I think it's a tech advancement issue, just like touch screens wasn't a thing for a very long time while it they were resistive. Then the iPhone came with capacitive touch screen and now they're everywhere. When (if ever) XR won't suck, which could take a decade or two, it will be adopted massively.

[HPsquared]

It's still just a bit too clunky, like PDAs. Still waiting for an iPhone moment.

[api]

I don't think it's even that. I don't think most people want it.

VR is for gaming. I can see it finding a solid niche there. Make a VR headset that connects to a PC/Mac with extremely low latency and focus all the engineering on the quality of the display and making it lightweight. Gamers will buy it.

AR is IMHO for industrial uses. I could see it being incredibly valuable doing inspections of industrial systems, working in a high-risk environment (for safety awareness), etc. I think the most practical depiction of AR in sci-fi is probably the heads up displays in The Expanse, which make perfect sense to augment human sensory in both military and industrial/maintenance operations in an environment like space.

I actively do not want AR for civilian uses. Yeah, I want to wear glasses and contacts to superimpose ads and slop and Internet drama in front of my life. Get that the hell away from me. When I want to touch grass, I want to touch grass.

A lot of that kind of stuff shows up in cyberpunk, and people forget that most cyberpunk is dystopian. The cyberpunk aesthetic is also kind of 1980s-1990s and is not contemporary. People are stuck in it. We're well past that and even on the tail end of "millennial minimalism" (the Apple aesthetic).

[ghaff]

There are certain other things you can imagine VR being useful for like virtual explorations. But monitors actually work pretty well for that and, really, none of that has really developed beyond the gimmick stage. Yes, there are certain types of high-end gaming it works for but that's a niche of a niche that's decreased in size over time. (e.g. flight sims used to be a bigger thing)

We can imagine HUDs of various sorts with AR glasses that are light and non-obtrusive. But largely well into the future. You may have (probably do have) early adopters who can overlook the manifold limitations that exist today but now you have a tiny audience that isn't enough to drive interesting software development.

[HPsquared]

I suppose with everyone on HUDs the subway train would be full of people catatonic staring straight ahead in their own little worlds, possibly recording everything around them on video.

[jsheard]

The Bigscreen Beyond is getting there in terms of form factor, but it achieves that in part by being a dumb headset which relies on a PC and external tracking beacons to work. There's no free lunch unfortunately, putting the brains in the headset itself is always going to add bulk.

https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

[api]

A dumb headset is exactly what I'd want. I don't want yet another device with an OS that locks you into someone's f'ing ecosystem or alternately requires me to find apps specifically for it, etc.

[plagiarist]

That's the form factor I want and that's the reliance on a PC that I want. I want VR glasses that are driven by my setup, not yet another account and yet another app store.

I'd buy that in an instant except last time I checked they thought they'd be scanning my face as part of the purchase.

[jsheard]

The face scan is required because they 3D print a gasket tailored exactly to your face, that's another part of how they managed to make it so compact.

[hoistbypetard]

The "still waiting" turn of phrase made me smile.

The Palm Pilot (not the first PDA, but an early decent one) pre-dated the iPhone by about 11 years. By that standard, we're likely on the order of a decade away from an "iPhone moment".