"Oh this thing on my coffee table? I didn't know people even use these for porn! No I've never used it for that. I really like the uhh... rollercoaster simulation..."
Clearly you're talking about a VCR, no wait, DVD player, no wait Laptop.
Re:The Tech Bubble Didn’t Burst This Year
by ethanbond on Friday October 21, 2016 @10:06AM
(#12760510)
Movies already existed and were wildly popular. The question was how to move them into the home.
VR is not wildly popular outside of the home, or anywhere else for that matter.
Unless you're implying that Rift solves a distribution problem? It doesn't, obviously.
>The question was how to move them into the home.
And in fact, movies were already in the home and had been for a long time. [1] (Of course, by the time VCRs were mass market, there was cable too.) So the question was really only how to watch movies in the home on your own schedule.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_Saturday_Night_at_the_Movi...
Mass market adoption is just right around the corner, I'm sure of it. Sarcasm aside, I'm not certain that it will never happen. It just seems like it's getting way more attention than it deserves.
I also think that the big players' involvement (namely Google and especially Facebook) is not doing VR any favors at all. Even the non-techy consumer class doesn't trust Facebook and I think they're right not to be interested in giving them a monopoly over their FOV.
I think the niche applications of VR or AR will be incredible. Things like engineering or medicine or maybe even data science will be forever changed by a successful VR platform. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be anyone's goal.