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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

> VR is not there and maybe never will be

I think that’s probably the ultimate truth at least as long as it requires glasses or goggles.

VR won’t be there, but VR may be here. Tens of millions of units are sold each year. That might be the right size of the market. It’s been around for 30 years now. In some ways it’s a mature market.

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That reasoning feels a bit like saying only tens of millions of smart phones will sell because rotary dial telephones have been around since the 1890s. I think its very fair to say the Quest and PSVR and all their friends are a big leap from Nintendo's Virtual Boy or something. Enough we should consider it a different market for sure. The real issue is software still to this day utterly sucks. There is zero incentive for existing games companies to make content until the market is as large and easy to port to as the existing status quo. The difference with 3D accelerated screen base 3D games was the entire form of entertainment was new and clearly valuable. Too many business people think VR is just another medium for existing 3D games, which also means its being treated like a new console or something with respect to investment. The barriers to entry for plucky homebrew creating something of super high quality is also much much higher than the start of 3D games. Valve already demonstrated what the good end of experiences can look like, even on older gen of VR hardware, but also demonstrated it takes a seriously talented team given total freedom to produce the best with investment behind them. Augmented reality who knows, metaverse type VR who knows. But we haven't even seen the basic uptake of high quality AAA VR software because it doesn't exist regardless of how good a headset is. It's like if a smartphone could only act like an analogue mobile phone and everyone questions the hardware being important.

I wasn’t thinking of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy. I was thinking of the stuff from Virtuality. It was a visor with an LCD for each eye, 3d head tracking, stereo sound and it connected to an Amiga. It’s very much like modern devices in the same way that a PS5 is similar to the original PlayStation and other consoles from that era.

We got to where we are today by incremental changes to shipping products over more than 30 years. What VR people hope Apple can do is take the technology we have and make it work for people just like they did with smartphones.

(consider adding more paragraphs next time, otherwise it's hard to read)

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