Serious question: why do you expect VR to take off with the general public? A decade into VR experiments, and nobody has come up with good non-gaming applications better than cartoony chat apps. It’s got a worse track record than blockchain.
I’m not expecting this to replace monitors for most people now. But next monitor upgrade, if you already work on a Macbook, it might be a better option than an external display for some people.
But...they aren't. People don't want it. What they want is a computer so light that it's always available. Most people seem to carry phones for consumption and sometimes lightweight laptops for work.
Busting out a portable wireless keyboard and putting on an HMD would be pretty neat IMO, if the HMD was good enough.
VR lets you swivel your head to get more real estate, but it doesn’t let you look at more pixels at once. Not unless you zoom out, which is what exposé already does.
But sure, you can strap a couple kilos of hardware to your face and take on that neck strain, disconnect yourself from the environment around you, and introduce motion sickness just to avoid pressing F3.
This is not true. VR gaming is something some people genuinely enjoy doing and paying money for. There are more than handful of VR gaming studios that can run healthy businesses based on this market.
I'm not saying that the Vision Pro will make VR replace laptops, someday it might, who knows. But suggesting that there is zero value from VR is also not true.
Apple is marketing this for general consumer adoption. What are those applications?
- VR meetings in my opinion feel better than 2D Zoom calls - but I don't see companies buying VR headsets for this purpose for their employees
- Education: There's definitely some cool stuff here, but hard to monetize I think (did something in this space a few years ago)
- Non-gaming entertainment, such as watching movies on big screens. This could be the next big area for VR after gaming.
- Fitness. You could count this as gaming, but specific fitness apps are really popular and I would define fitness as a separate category.
- Playing table tennis in VR is more fun than in real life since you don't have to go chasing around the room to pick up balls.
- I've used VR headsets to show my parents and other elderly folks photosphere shots I've taken from mountain summits that they would never be able to access or see in person.
- There are some VR games that are quite well received (e.g., Half-Life Alyx).
- Beat Saber is a blast.
I totally agree that where the technology is today, it's not ready for broad adoption. But as displays, materials, and capabilities expand, so too do the possibilities. We're probably not going to hit sci-fi levels of VR anytime in the next decade, but we can almost certainly create compelling experiences that go far beyond what exists today.
Being able to "summit" a mountain without actually being there is an interesting use case though. Thanks for that.
- Virtual desktop experience at least as good as a single 27inch monitor
- Doesn't make me nauseous or hurt my neck
- Isn't egregiously expensive (3,500 is pretty steep)