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Comment by Awelton | Hacker News Reader

VR is CEO bait. They can't let go of the idea of strapping advertising and tracking devices directly to peoples heads. It's just too tantalizing. Almost nobody has any interest in VR, but absolutely nobody has interest in facebook VR. It will never be anything more than a niche toy, and before long it will go the way of 3D televisions. We are going to see many more big companies burn heaps of money chasing this dream before it goes away again. They simply can't help themselves.

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It'll happen but only when it is so subtle, cheap and unobtrusive that users don't even notice it gaining a foothold. The technology will advance to a point and a use case will evolve where people will end up wearing AR devices in their daily lives and then the lame advertising model will take hold. Why FB et al is jumping straight to the endgame and not building the must-have killer app first, I don't understand.

Why will it happen? I don’t understand.

1. VR/AR goggles

2. ????

3. Profit

I think what’s happening is that tech CEOs think the next big disruptive thing is overdue — 1984: Mac. 1994: Web. 2007: iPhone. 2010: social media — “S-curve” theory is astrology for tech executives, and they all buy into it because they don’t understand how anything actually works in real life. Steve Jobs was an exception, but he’s long gone, RIP.

To make VR work for the masses requires display devices that haven’t been invented yet, or a killer app that makes a new generation of children willing to do it. Adults aren’t going to strap goggles to their faces for 8 hours a day. They’re just not.

It's not ???, it's closer to an advertiser's dream: camera access to the room, eye tracking, mouth tracking, heart/blood pressure (anything that fits on a fitness watch), driver level access to the PC, and user forced to use your walled garden. Along with getting rid of all the threats the browser has with ad blocking, Javascript blocking, and lack of being able to scan user files (even the supposed privacy champion Apple scans user files).

I don't see how AR will be useful without face recognition. The killer app is something like I go get a coffee and instantly know the barista's real name and they know my real name from AR face recognition.

People are not interested though in that level of personal interaction.

VR with a headset is an obvious dead end. The real litmus test is that blind people find VR interesting. It is incredible how we have solved basically nothing in this space and still only have a better version of VRML.

I think it has a future in the niche of video games, not as a replacement for traditional video games but as a niche that exists alongside them.

Treating them as anything more than entertainment is where you lose me. They had the right niche all the way back in 2011 with the DK1 - how did they lose the plot so badly since then?

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