It's always fun to watch media before a thing explodes in popularity and becomes part of everyday life; during that period when the thing still sucks, but a lot of smart people are working on it because they see some incredible potential. I'm not sure that VR will be one of those things, but I'm pretty confident of it. I recently got a VR headset, one of the cheapo kind that you stick your phone in, just to try it out. It's pretty much amazing.

I mean, it's stupid, all the games and apps are stupid, all the videos are stupid, interaction is clumsy, almost everything I try to use shifts steadily to the left until I can't see anything anymore without turning my head, and eventually turning my whole body around to keep up with the shift, and all around it just barely works at all. But, it's still amazing.

That tells me something really big is going to happen; the Internet started out the same way. It was stupid. You could watch a video, if it was 1/10th the screen size, buffered for several minutes, and you didn't need it to look very good. Regular old television was a million times better. I feel like we're at that same point right now with VR. It all sucks right now (probably because I have a cheapo VR headset that uses my phone and my phone isn't well-supported by the VR players, but it was cheap), but we're only a year or so into the "anyone can afford it" phase.

Think how many years it took for the tech to use the full potential of the Internet took to make it into the majority of homes. I think we're still way too early to tell how VR is gonna play out, but when I use it, I feel a bit of that old "OMG, this is gonna be huge in ways I can't predict" feeling the Internet gave me the first time I logged on.