Electric cars are far from new, in fact, the first car to exceed 100 km/h in 1899, was an electric car named "La jamais contente".
And for decades after that, other impractical electric cars came out. But as technology improved, they started looking more and more promising, then commercially viable, then desirable, and they are on their way to becoming mainstream.
I think we are at about the same point with VR. It is more than a novelty, but here are still kinks to iron out before it becomes mainstream.
Also, in the "Early 90's," state of the art was an AMPS Motorola bag phone on Cellular One.
Not the same as mobile itself being a hype for any period of time.
The only people I knew who had cell phones in the early nineties were my rich uncle and Zack Morris.
Not because "huh, why would I want one" given the price being alright.
In case you forgotten what we're disputing, a grand-grand parent wrote "[VR] It's a constant hype/disappointment cycle" and another replied: "Mobile” was the same until it was just everywhere".
To which I replied that no, mobile wasn't "like that" (= a constant hype/disappointment cycle).
Mobile started growing fast (exploded) in early nineties and KEPT growing. Like with the iPod (that broke in early 00s and kept growing and growing until it was superseded by smartphones), there were no hype/disappointment cycles with mobile.
VR, on the other hand, did have hype/disappointment cycles. In 90-92 VR was touted as the "next big thing", then the craze passed and it disappeared (living only the legacy of having inspired the Lawnmower Man movie), taking 15+ years to re-emerge.
Similar, AI was touted as "imminent" in the 70s, only to break down in the 80s (the so-called AI-winter) and it took 20+ years to drive back mainstream tech interest again.
Mobile, on the contrary, never stalled once it got going.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyjMpXpsnyI/TZWzzCflQiI/AAAAAAAAP_...
You: There was an explosion of mobile phone use in the early nineties.
Me: no there wasn't.
You: well that's only because the tech was too expensive.
Me: glad we agree.
You: no I was right the first time, look at this graph which shows an exponential increase in use in the early 2000's.
Me: ?
Explosion in the early 90s != everybody used them in the early 90s.
Explosion = the industry got traction / was kickstarted and kept on going and going.
Just as in the chart.
As contrasted with VR which in 90-92 there was a huge hype, and it got nowhere, people forgot about it, and it was resurrected 10-15 years later.
>You: no I was right the first time, look at this graph which shows an exponential increase in use in the early 2000's.
Err, the graph starts around 1988 -- and the "increase" is sustained from then until the end of the graph (and probably still today).
Nope
>Explosion in the early 90s != everybody used them in the early 90s.
Never said that
>Explosion = the industry got traction / was kickstarted and kept on going and going.
No, explosion means something along the lines of "a sudden outburst". Anything that plods along slowly cannot be considered an explosion. The slope of your own reference is rather timid until at the later nineties.
>As contrasted with VR which in 90-92 there was a huge hype, and it got nowhere, people forgot about it, and it was resurrected 10-15 years later.
Not the same thing. The tech simply didn't exist. At least, not in a manner which we would deem acceptable. Cell phone tech was fine, but it was simply too expensive.
>Err, the graph starts around 1988 -- and the "increase" is sustained from then until the end of the graph (and probably still today).
It is not "sustained": it begins increasing rapidly in the late 90's! In other words, it "explodes". Let's be honest here; in a response to another person you claimed that the plot showed 1B users, but the Y axis only goes to 300M. I'm not convinced you can even read that thing.
That's a pedantic distinction (not that I mind). I wasn't going for "explosion" as in "suddenly tons of people had one", but as in "suddenly there was a boom and a new viable market had emerged".
How hard is to get my main point?
Mobile got some kind of kickstart in the early 90s (I called it an explosion, but I could not care less if it's not that, that's not my point), and it never stopped going. Perhaps you'd agree if I'd merely called it "a bang" in the 90s? A starting point for big growth?
That was my point in a throwaway response I made at someone's comment that "mobile was like VR" at the start of this thread.
Whether that can be called an explosion or not, I could not care less. In my country, that's what we'd call it. There was a market that started from almost nothing before (some flat numbers in the US, almost zero in most of Europe). Unlike early 90s VR, which was a short hype in 1990 or so that then stopped.
From 1990 onwards, every year we had a big boost in the sub numbers. As I wrote, from a few dozen in 1990 (~16M globally) to ~1 Billion in 2000 (~ 800M to be precise).
That's explosive growth in my book, and I've lived several others techs that never seen such rapid growth. The only comparable thing would be the internet itself (from mostly academics in 1990 to a huge economic force in 2000). To contrast, it took 5 decades of development for PCs to get to the same point.
In any case, my focus wasn't on it being an "explosion" part, but on it never have been an "hype/unhype" cycle like early VR was. Unlike 90s VR hype (and other hypes) mobile merely went from strength to strength.
>Not the same thing. The tech simply didn't exist.
Sure, but that didn't stop the media and companies then to hype it for a couple of years. And then forget about it for 15+ years.
Here's what I'm referring to:
https://www.pcmag.com/feature/343351/the-wacky-world-of-vr-i...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LyjMpXpsnyI/TZWzzCflQiI/AAAAAAAAP_...
Globally the numbers were ~15M in 1990, ~100M 1995, ~0.8B in 2000 (far from 100M in 2000).
And my point was, mobile exploded in 1990 and "kept expanding" (literally my words") -- there was like VR "a constant hype/disappointment cycle" (literally the thing I was responding to in this very thread).
For VR, most of the major industry players are continuing to invest (and were never expecting it to go mainstream in the last few years), and the active user count is persistently going up. The absolute numbers are relatively low. But the cost, software, and hardware right now are all pretty terrible and rapidly being improved.
With a growing base and major cost/quality improvements on the horizon it probably has a fairly secure future as a niche gaming platform. I don't think the data is conclusive yet on whether VR is the Next Big Thing.
There's kind of a chicken-and-egg SW problem for new platforms. Most of the popular mobile apps were only developed because of a large existing base of networked devices. For iPhone 1.0, the killer app was probably the ability to use the desktop web. Is there anything VR could do for normal consumers, that doesn't require enormous software investment (before there's a market)?
People watching TV/movies on their phone/tablet is pretty common (in addition to the living room). It doesn't seem too out there that VR could become cheap/good/comfortable enough to be popular for that use case (watching 2D TV on a phone). It's only marginally less social if you're watching by yourself anyway, and could even feel more social depending how the virtual theater is set up. Maybe that's one pathway that could drive more mainstream adoption.
I think it's premature to mark VR as a fad just yet, at least before not-terrible mobile systems come out. There's not too many tech products I can think of that would be popular if they could only be used chained to a $1000 desktop PC.
In any case, it's not really debatable: mobile grew and kept growing. I know, I was there in those "early nineties".
I think we're done here. It's ok to just say you were wrong you know.
I just did that re: the numbers, above, you know.
Explosive, we have to agree to disagree. I'm not a native speaker, but it seems to me a perfectly OK use of the word. In any case, it wasn't my main fucking point, which was simply that unlike VR in the 90s, mobile never had a hype/flat period: the market got on, and never stopped growing until almost everybody on the planet had one. I already wrote that like 6 times. Do you disagree with that?
Amazing how someone can go into such trivia and miss the main point I was making and in a thro-away comment of mine at that... Jeez...
It's a constant hype/disappointment cycle, albeit it's getting better at every iteration; it's far from delivering on their promises though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#History