Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR

Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by vkou on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:32PM (#18851796)

A 20mb harddrive the size of a shoebox is not a technology in its infancy. It is an incredibly useful, paradigm-changing piece of engineering, as long as you're not hoping to use it to store rich media.

Nothing in AR has hit that yet. VR kinda-maybe-sorta does, but even in games, it's an expensive, niche periphery, at best.

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Re:Marc Andreessen: VR will be 1,000 times bigger than AR by ethbro on Monday January 07, 2019 @08:02PM (#18851968)

> Nothing in AR has hit that yet.

The biggest problem AR has is that most people aren't fighter pilots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3vbPEtSbv0&t=54s

Hard drives succeeded (in the sense that we now see) because they exponentially created more use cases for themselves (by driving more data processing and storage).

AR doesn't really do that. Most people simply can't derive value from annotations over the real world, in the way they can by simply storing things. So the total addressable market is a lot smaller. Furthermore, AR adoption doesn't drive more AR adoption.

Which is where the VR case is stronger. There are some scenarios (all social) where I can see viral, exponential VR adoption. For all its flaws, the fact that SecondLife still exists demonstrates there's enough of an escapist market to self-sustain.

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