Who said they will stay goggles? This should eventually get into the stage of normal glasses for AR and curved sunglasses for VR.

I think a billion or so people will use VR in the next 20 years, and 4+ billion will use AR.

VR hasn't failed repeatedly. As someone with a good hook on the history of the tech, consumer VR has only ever failed once in the 1990s, and that wasn't even a serious attempt.

To put it into perspective, the entirety of 1990s consumer VR investment totals at best, one week of VR investment in the modern world. That's how little money and effort was put into VR back then, and it's because no large company actually released anything. It was only small companies like Forte. Nintendo/Sega/Atari released nothing in the end (Virtual Boy isn't VR so it doesn't count).

The market has responded differently this time. The investment is orders of magnitude higher, the sales are orders of magnitude higher, and the market has lasted thrice as long with more competitors jumping into the mix this year. On the technical side, some core problems with 1990s VR were fixed, and while a lot is left to fix, much of that is being worked on in R&D with solid results to show for so far.

> It wasn’t customers who said PCs & smartphones & the internet would fail - it was the entrenched business interests that didn’t get it. That’s not the case here.

It was both businesses falling behind the times and consumers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxcfgfxYJow

https://wayback.archive-it.org/5902/20150629134551/http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf01313/patterns.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycVyGb5ID90&t=228s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07xxyfLySA&t=761s

> They aren’t “visionaries” - they’re dilettantes with huge egos and way too much money to burn.

This is the classic response that even the people you would consider visionaries have to deal with. Though you would consider them visionaries with the benefit of hindsight.

> Everyone told these same “visionaries” that “smart speakers” were stupid & creepy too, and what happened? After billions wasted on marketing hype all the research recently concluded that yup, the market was right & nobody wants them either! They’re useless baubles.

There are hits and misses in tech, but point to me to a digital medium and/or fundamentally new computing platform (these are accurate descriptions of VR/AR) that failed to eventually take off. There are no examples of the latter, and I'm having trouble recalling any of the former, but maybe there's a few rare examples.

These same arguments could be made for computers and phones.

If your attitude prevailed for PCs/phones, then r/gadgets wouldn't exist, nor would the Internet or 99% of the modern world.

Visionaries move on regardless and create things that people don't know they want. Yes, people didn't know they wanted a computer or phone - most people can only think of faster horses, not what comes after the horse.

> I don’t have much reason to use it as a TV

The tech is just way too early. If it was just a pair of glasses today, your TV is still leagues better in resolution and clarity.

There will be a day where VR reaches parity with TVs and allows you to have any size you want in any space/position you want, complete with lighting control and the ability to share the screen with anyone across the planet as if they are sitting next to you - in a small form factor.

When that day comes, the reasons become a lot clearer. Though I think AR/VR will share this virtual display category as there are reasons why having a view of the real world is important at times.

There are already millions of VR players.

Actually it's pretty easy to make the argument that VR stands to be the highest bandwidth of communication information across all mediums, including real life.

Well, touch and smell and taste are technically a part of communication, so real life has VR beat there, but as far as our vision and hearing, VR can over time replicate every detail of real world communication - all our microexpressions - put that onto a perfectly realistic avatar of ourselves, or go Disney/anime style and have overly expressive avatars instead, which have an extra layer of communication that real life can't provide.

If you've watched VTubers or even just seen Disney movies, you know that there are things that can only be conveyed by such abstractions.

So VR will have as much visual/auditory expressability as the real world when going for full simulation of our real selves, or can offer extra expressability. And all other mediums exist in VR. I've shared photos, hyperlinks, videos, gifs, memes, and audio files in VR social spaces. You can also dial this up further and become the meme. I could have an avatar of the kool aid man.

> However, I think one of the biggest feelings of loss (besides lives) from the pandemic was that in-person connectivity. So given the option to socialize in-person, I agree that VR loses its footing a bit.

If we take a scale of 1-10, then letters would be a 1, texting would be a 2, phonecalls a 3, and videocalls a 4.

Everything before 5 would feel very much like a screen-based experience, devoid of the main social expectations of real life. Anything above 5 would feel very much like a real world experience.

If reality is a 10, then VR when it has matured 10-15 years from now will be a 9, which is close enough to make it invaluable.

> VR implies disconnecting personally in the same room, and being more online. And the way people are moving in online connectivity, it isn't VR. It's streaming, Discord servers, live chats, Twitch, messengers, etc. It seems a lot of people don't want to be so immersed into a game world they lose a lot of communication and interaction with other humans in the process.

This actually shows just how well-suited VR is.

Streaming, discord servers, live chats, twitch, messengers - how can all of this be improved? What is the ideal interface for all this social stuff? Meta has it right; it's VR where you go beyond chatting on a 2D screen and actually get to feel like you are face to face with other people.

> No matter how good VR gets only a few people would want to grocery shop or go to a bar in VR.

Grocery shop? Sure, but I think there's mass appeal in going to public venues in VR. A bar specifically, I don't know, but think of all the other public venues and combine that with the state of the world being one where most people are frequently not able to meet up with friends because distance is vast, money is tight, and life gets in the way.

VR gets rid of all of that. I mean you still need the device, but once you have it you go to infinite destinations, hopefully within a few handfuls of seconds as headsets get faster/more mature.

And as VR does mature, there will simply be this gut feeling that you are actually in another place, actually with a person face to face, actually having these experiences. It won't feel as physical as the real thing, but it will be so far beyond a videocall or phonecall, that it will sell itself easily on the value of the presence VR brings.

AR/VR are quickly converging into the same device so that's easily accounted for. I don't just mean a toggle between the two so you have to choose, but the full blending of the two so you aren't really in one state or another but have a mix of the two.

When I say AR will take off after VR, I specifically mean optical AR through transparent glasses. That's a much harder physical problem to solve.

The goal of VR is not to take every single one of these things and to put them into VR, to completely VR-ify them, but instead to provide an eventually better multi-tasking computing interface than a PC allows.

All of those things, you'd do normally, but instead of physical monitors, it would be with virtual monitors. Where you can have 3 or 5 monitors set up how you want in any angle/position without taking up physical space (I can only fit one on my desk), and have different configurations for different needs to instantly switch between. Like one for work, one for media (just one giant IMAX screen), one for casual browsing etc.

Some things may be VR-ified like Amazon shopping, but only as a hybrid experience. Start out with a 2D virtual screen experience like normal, but have the ability to pull out items in 3D to see them in full scale, to try on clothes etc.

Full VR-centric experiences will need to provide a reason to switch the interface entirely into VR. With maturity of the tech, this would satisfy the needs of working from home, online schooling, and all forms of entertainment and many forms of recreation that we don't really think of as entertainment (like socializing, travel, exercise, and health).

Smartphones are the only form of technology at that level of popularity. Everything else is much less popular, even TVs.

So I don't think 'the next big thing' has to be as popular as smartphones to be honest.

I expect AR will get to that stage, but with VR taking off before AR, I can also see it being 'the next big thing' on the same level as something like PCs.

The reason why is because unlike a console, VR has many more uses. It's effectively a general purpose computing platform.

VR is beyond failure. That much is written in stone at this point.

Consumer VR first existed in the 1990s. Anything prior to that existed only in arcades and laboratories or a rare enterprise deal.

I suppose there was hype in the 1980s, but not consumer hype.

There's also PCs and TVs. Those are inbetween the console and smartphone market.

That's likely where VR will end up.

> VR will never take off with parents, and no there isn’t any time for gaming, I can only watchTV or go on my phone but I can’t commit to gaming.

Well consider there are over 3 billion gamers, and a lot of those are adults. So it would seem that a large amount of adults do have time for gaming.

As for parents, it really depends on the point of life they are in. If they are more elderly, then at that point, they probably will want to use it to connect with the rest of the family without being physically present.

Well it doesn't matter either way. Most people use VR for socializing, not for gaming.

Reddit is just an echo chamber. Best to assume that the majority opinion on reddit is the minority opinion in the real world.

It sounds like you would have said the same thing about PCs in the early 1980s.

"Work? Socializing? Shopping? Bah. Just let PCs be used for gaming. It doesn't need to be all these other things."

Yet look at how PCs are used today. Gaming is a huge part, but so are all these other things, and it's going to be no different for VR.

> Yep. Every decade, going back to 1980s.

Let me count. 1980s, no. 1990s, yes. 2000s, no. 2010s yes.

So that's twice. One that failed, and one where it is finally here to stay.

Doesn't seem like 'every decade' to me.

I mean it's very obvious that VR will take off before AR, and it's pretty obvious that it will be for adults too.

Normal adults have time for gaming/surfing the web/TV, so they will have plenty of time for VR too.

Most people consider chatting on a phone/PC to be not all that fulfilling and certainly not rich. This is why despite a larger barrier/commitment, socializing in VR has many benefits to doing so over regular devices.

> AR wins because you’re still tethered to reality, you can still do all the things you need to in the real world and have the advantages that VR would offer.

Not necessarily. AR glasses will always have field of view limitations and cannot subsume VR's unique usecases, and at least for the next 15 years, will be behind VR in clarity.

I do think AR will be several times bigger overall, but we shouldn't assume that AR is going to do everything VR does but better - it just doesn't work that way.

False. It's objectively decided that VR will become mainstream first.

This is a matter of laws of physics. AR has to come after, because VR gets solved first, and there's no way around that.

> Like how do you do your homework WHILE playing Minecraft and watching a movie if you have a display over your eyes vs a monitor or two?

Pretty simple really: You simulate as many virtual displays as you want in any position/configuration you want. Thus making VR actually superior than even the best PC setup for multi-tasking.

That's not really viable today though. Comfort, resolution, tracking, input - these all need large improvements first, but eventually it will out-PC a PC.