Right. Which should absolutely scream to an entrepreneurial crowd there's an immense opportunity here to develop the VR version of cinema.
The time you want to get into an emerging technology is precisely this stage. The groundwork has been laid but the direction is not yet set.
That's the puzzling part to me, that HN isn't all over that aspect of things.
Now, it can either achieve its Eureka moment and blossom into something really useful.
Or it can continue to wallow in obscurity finding at most a few niche applications.
Not every technology that is invented is destined to become world-changing like cinema or antibiotics. There are plenty that become the Betamaxes and Segways of history. At one point the Segway was also heralded to be the Second Coming of transportation.
Part of the problem is that the groundwork has been laid but nobody has the slightest idea which direction to go in. To be clear, it's not that we have a wealth of choices ahead of us and can't choose which one, it's that we have so few choices ahead of us that look genuinely promising.
- VR workspaces/entertainment spaces (see: 50 foot theater screen in your living room!)
- Cockpit-style VR gaming experiences (flying, driving, etc)
- Room-sized VR gaming experiences ("experiences" might be overselling a bit, all are tech demos where the room-size motion tracking feels more like a bug than a feature)
- ???
It seems pretty likely at this point that #2 (cockpit style gaming) is likely to succeed, at least moderately, but all of these other things are being tried but just aren't that interesting.
Even if you think conservatively and consider only vr-ifying apps we already have: For VR, some types of games (Elite Dangerous, Until Dawn), applications directly related to design of real physical environments and objects. For AR there many obvious industrial applications even with simple overlaid indicators, eg in inspection and manufacturing. In AR games there are also many quite obvious concepts that should work (think eg party games or outdoor games) and you would be way off to say "we haven't come up with any worthwhile games" at this point.