How Virtual Reality Died

> [...] there’s no way that Zuckerberg can make that look cool. The people who spend hour after hour in his metaverse will be [...] nerds and incels and the most disgruntled members of society, each desperate for escape.

I think similar could be said of the early Internet - a niche for nerds with expensive clunky hardware. Not that it's an actively positive indicator (many niches stay that), but equally I don't think it's a reliable reason to dismiss a technology.

> Then in August, Meta cancelled the development of a next generation VR headset.

On this, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth claimed "we have many prototypes in development at all times. But we don't bring all of them to production. We move forward with some, we pass on others. Decisions like this happen all the time"[0]. Meta have since released a new headet and showed off "Orion"[1] which looks neat.

Granted that's a budget headset and a non-consumer prototype, but I think it's too early to say Meta have abandoned VR. There is also still an ecosystem of other companies (HTC, Bigscreen, Sony, ByteDance, Pimax, ...) releasing their own headsets.

[0]: https://x.com/boztank/status/1827066396200858078

[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-firs...