The CEO of unity believes that AR/VR will be bigger than the internet and develop in much the same way [1].

Obviously he is biased but still pretty big statement from a CEO of the most popular game engine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODXMhaNIF5E

Bit of a cringey statement to say "bigger than the internet" considering almost every AR/VR application will rely heavily on the internet. I think the spirit of his statement was that it'll be bigger than the Web.

Not really, platforms like the hololens are essentially the Commodore 64 of AR. It's neat, and has some practical application, but it can't quite deliver on its full potential. I don't know which AR headset will be the Windows/Apple of this technology but I can describe it. Lightweight, stylish, essentially a smartphone on your face.

What AR not-so-obviously does is takes the internet and changes it from a limited access interface, wherein its a technology that has points of access that are limited to terminals that you have to actively access to an interface that you passively interact with.

An interface that you have to seek out, to an interface that seeks you out.

He meant to say "bigger than the Beatles".

> big statement from a CEO of the most popular game engine

You mean someone that has a personal financial interest in a market growing is talking about how that market might grow. That's not very surprising to hear, don't you think?

Can't be bigger than the internet if it is one of the things that runs on top of the internet.

It's like stating that computers are bigger than electricity.

With the important difference that getting on the early Internet only required a telephone line, which everybody already had, and a modem, an inexpensive piece of hardware you did not have to physically strap onto your face.

No it also required a computer, which a lot of people did not have back in the mid-90s, and not everyone was prepared to shell out the money to get one (it was certainly not "inexpensive" if you were buying one for the sole purpose of getting online).

My source on this? I worked at one of the first consumer ISPs in Canada, and we regularly had people coming in to sign up because they heard about "this Internet thing" but did not have a computer.

Most people thought we provided one with the service, and some people just didn't understand that you accessed the Internet through a computer.

I left that out because VR also requires an expensive computer -- expensive at least compared to what most people have. Rift, for instance, requires not just a discrete GPU but a pretty serious one (GTX 970/1060 level), in a market where only about a third of PCs sold at retail in 2016 had a discrete GPU at all (see http://www.anandtech.com/show/10864/discrete-desktop-gpu-mar...).

So, if by "VR" you mean Vive/Rift-level VR, very few people will have a computer already lying around the house that can cut the mustard, even if they bought that computer relatively recently.

Buying a VR headset and a new gaing computer today is still significantly cheaper than buying a home computer in the 90's for the early internet

https://pifflelab.com/2012/07/22/computers-the-1990s-you-pai...

I was not disputing your point that VR is expensive to get into (I own a Vive), but rather that getting online in the 90s was not expensive.

It also required ridiculous metered long distance fees, forced you to lock up the family telephone line, and buying and installing a modem was much harder without the help of the internet.

I would advance the hypothesis that the prospect of the internet back then seemed much worse compared to dropping a few hundred to have Vive hardware shipped to your door and plugging it in. But the people who built the internet saw what it could be, not the garbage that it was.

And we're still in the beta stages; this stuff only gets better with time.

Lets not forget ruining two perfectly fine rubber plunger, if you did it DIY.