Anecdotally, the pattern many of us have seen keep happening over the last 5+ years is that enthusiasm and novelty is very very high when first discovering these modern lightweight headsets but then usage just falls off a cliff after a while.

You're in the first phase. Maybe the second phase won't arrive for you.

They're extremely exciting, but seem to get a little same-y or something. Only insiders really know, but there might be a bit of an invisible ceiling that somebody still needs to figure out how to break through in order to keep engagement up. It might be a killer app, it might be a further advances in mixed reality, it might be continued reduction in weight or increases in display quality, but it also might just be that there's an inherent limitation that prevents them from taking over the world. Not every cool gadget does.

It's nice to know you're in the good old days before you've left them. :-)

I can definitely see the novelty wearing off given enough time, same as anything. Plus to your point you can clearly see apps follow one of a few formulas.

I think VR will gradually and massively extend the capabilities of humanity but not revolutionize them. Regular screens, phones, etc will still exist, they will always have a place in our society. But VR will more and more become an accepted and common tool, for use cases that are different from regular devices. Until suddenly you realize that indeed they are everywhere and you use them all the time. It's not going to be an immediate "revolution" the way ChatGPT was (I think you could probably say the same about any hardware innovation).

I think the closest comparison is that VR right now is like PDAs in the 90s. Yeah, everyone knew they were the future, but the hardware absolutely blew, And it took another 10-20 years to arrive at the perfect form factor of a smartphone. Lots of hardware innovations need to happen for VR - hell, not a single consumer headset has shipped with a vergence-accommodation conflict solution. But give it another 10-20 years and I am certain we'll be seeing that smartphone type moment.

Im not surprised about the negative comments. I’d be more surprised if the negative commenters have even tried VR. VR and AR are just such a huge paradigm shift that according to the data, only tweens and children “just get it” as a demographic group without a lot of coaxing and explaining. I would say that it’s their generation’s NES. Being an adult VR enthusiast feels like being part of something like the homebrew computer club, well until Quest came along.

I've tried VR, have a bunch of friends with headsets (and a team headset for work, since I work adjacent to AR/VR) and find it mildly interesting when I do try it but not interesting enough to buy a headset with my own money. My kids have both been offered turns but declined.

I honestly don't see the trend that you've been describing among my kids or their older peers. Honestly, NES is this generation's NES; I was shocked that "Marios & Bowsers" is now a playground game (it's basically sharks & minnows), and my kid will spend hours playing MarioKart if given a chance. My kid is an avid gamer but his favorites are all the Tower-defense games you get on Google Play, as well as classics like Tetris or Candy Crush and racing games like MarioKart.

I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics and going outside for face-to-face entertainment more. IMHO the 2010s were the high water mark for gaming, and that if anything the trend today has been to detach from devices and have more actual experiences.

Yeah, and the friends whose houses I've been over to so I could try their VR setups — stopped using their headsets soon after getting them.

> I think there's also a trend - particularly among affluent families - of going back to basics

You’re right, but tbf you’re filtering for upper class families

This is just not my experience at all.

I have 12-14 year old gamer nieces and nephews. They simply don't care about VR.

Even at a family gathering with the host having a Quest, no one cares to even try it out.

It was just absolutely nothing to do them.

Personally, I have been waiting for VR since the early 90s and the Lawnmower Man.

With having no interest in games, my experience is exactly the same as my nieces and nephews. Just a whole lot of nothing. I almost wonder if people who post things like this are not some kind of viral marketing because this is just not reality.

According to the data, it’s children and tweens that dominate the MAUs. Also just read Reddit about complaints of most online VR games being dominated by children as a counter to your anecdote of one family.

"Most VR users are children" is a very different statement from "Most children are VR users." The former can be very true without the latter being true at all; it just implies that "most people are not VR users", which is also true.

You have a point, but my comment is better than an anecdote.

There’s about 30 million children in the US in the right age group for using VR headsets, and over 20 million Quest headsets have been sold. It might not be accurate to believe that most children will accept VR, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility especially since the MAUs for adults are terrible.

The market for VR headsets is worldwide, so the right denominator is the ~600B children in the developed world. If you generously figure that half of those headsets are used by children, that's ~2% penetration, which seems more like it.

20M units sold is tiny for a consumer electronics product, BTW. I work on Android Tablets, and we have ~300M MAU. Phones are 3B. 20M makes VR only about 20% of the market size of AndroidTV, which has about 110M units sold.

That’s not a good way of framing it because the vast majority of the headsets were sold in the US. I would be surprised if there were even healthy sales in developing countries, so we shouldn’t be counting all of the children in the world. Not to mention that you probably have to exclude children under 10 give or take.

Yes, I agree that VR is not popular with most of the adult population. At the moment, VR has a similar stigma that computers, the internet, and video games once had. It will likely stay that way until these children become adults, unless Apple can refine “spatial computing” fast enough to overcome the stigma.

Tweens and children are the only ones with supple inner ear linings.

As a 40-yo VR enthusiast, I can't play anything that requires elective X/Y movement (first person shooter) without getting sick. The "teleport" mechanic is really clunky.

My kids can play anything and never get sick.

My parents can't even do a driving sim without getting dizzy in a couple of minutes.

Not 40 yet but neither me and friends have experienced that.

I'm in my late 40s and I can run around with smooth movements without any issues.

Of course, N=1...

Same for me too. I tried different VR headsets, but could not use them for more than 15 minutes without getting dizzy.

> The matrix is coming and I got a feeling metas gonna own it.

This is the least cyberpunk sentence I've ever read.

10 years and tens of billions of dollars to get to that experience. Not astonishing in my book.

> Also you can't directly connect to steamVR without going through Quest link

Is this true? I have a quest 2 and just downloaded the steam link app and it seems to just work. Are you talking about wired?

Yes. The app will work over wireless. Not wired.