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by martindbp 251 days ago
VR is in the trough of disillusionment phase right now, but I can almost guarantee you we'll see a slow but steady climb from here. The big question is if Meta will continue to invest into the space or if other smaller players will fill its place.
1 comments
frumplestlatz 251 days ago
For 35 years, I’ve been hearing similar pronouncements about the inevitability of VR being just around the corner.

What’s different this time?

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martindbp 250 days ago
What's different is that Meta has sold 20+ million headsets, and there is a decent sized user base, albeit much smaller than people expected 5 years ago. This is not a dead technology just because you don't use it. In 2023 Meta Quest had roughly 6.3 million monthly active users.

According to this, 1.63% of Steam MAU have a VR headset which translates to roughly 2 million MAU: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

So, in some sense not a lot, but it has a decent foothold of people using it often. It's clearly different from VR in the past where there were literally a handful or maybe on the order of hundreds of headsets in the world. VR now also has a ton of different niches and use cases beyond games. I also think a comparison with gaming console hardware is more apt than comparing it to something like PC or smartphone sales.

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rsynnott 251 days ago
There are kind of two ways to look at VR. One is "no-one wants this because it is a bad idea". The other is "this is a good idea, but no-one wants it because the tech is grossly inadequate". _If_ option two is correct, then maybe eventually it sees adoption, as the hardware finally gets good enough. Personally I suspect that option one is correct, but I've been wrong about this sort of thing before and I wouldn't be _totally_ shocked if number two comes to pass.

(There's also number three: "this is magic and will change everything, and you'll do all your socialising and work via VR", but this is just bubble-pumping nonsense and I doubt anyone _actually_ believes it. And option four, which is like option two except that "good enough" is essentially technically impossible.)

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