> VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary

That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and still not ready for prime time.

Fun fact, the idea of cellphones was "decades old" [0] in 1990 and not ready for prime time (clunky, not particularly useful outside of niche cases). Less than two more decades later, the iPhone came out and the entire world changed around them. VR is clearly still missing its "iPhone moment", and Meta is spending like hell to be the one to find it.

Full disclosure: I am (today) a VR nay-sayer, despite this comment.

[0] https://thenib.com/this-comic-from-1919-imagines-what-it-s-l...

Gut feeling is that the cellphone was already far more mainstream in the year 2000 than VR is in 2022. I had one (Nokia 5110?) as a teenager (admittedly I was in the minority), but I remember they were extremely common amongst professionals. Perhaps the iPhone turned cellphones from "one per family" to "one per person" but VR is still nowhere close to the former.

The current state of VR is not decades old. It’s like saying automobiles are decades old so EVs are not exciting.

The current state of anything under active development isn't old, sort of by definition.

I take your point, but in my opinion nothing currently happening in the space gets remotely close to "revolutionary" , and maybe not even "cool" for some peoples value of "cool". It's more the same-old-same-old, chipping away at the broad array of problems.

So if you really want to us an automobile analogy, it's not like it's IC vs EV. It's more like steam powered vs. early electric (they predated IC's!) and nobody has come up with an IC yet. Or the right road system to use them on.

Older automobiles were still useful, though. The Model T transformed rural America and many cities. VR has been portrayed as close to that point many times for decades but has flopped hard at finding anything many people want to do. It was primitive back then, but so were video games in the 1970s and they still sold a ton of systems. Maybe there’s an inflection point where things will flip but it seems hard to believe that we’re still in the pre-Pong era of something which will become huge.

EVs are cool but for the vast majority of people they're just cars that do car things slightly differently.

And VR has been in some form of "cool to play with for awhile and then left on the shelf" for decades now.

It gets better each time, but it's still just a plaything.

Three really awesome responses that got me thinking, so I’ll just reply to myself…

I own a Quest which mostly my son uses for games and loves, and I occasionally game on. It’s cool. It’s also a toy I would never try to use for work.

I can imagine a VR/AR technology that is world changing. It’s hard to say if it’s technologically and physically possible to implement ever or if it’s just fantasy. It’s also really hard to know exactly how far away we are from a toy to something that makes a very large number of workers significantly more productive.

I’ll say this, in a world where a lot of work is being done remotely, it seems to me that VR could be a powerful game changer with the right hardware and the right UI for company and team cohesion, feeling connected to peers, and collaboration.

Some day I am certain we will look back at Zoom-style telepresence and laugh at how quaint it is.

I don’t think we’ll ever spend 8 hours straight every day in VR, unless you’re the rare employee spending their entire day in meetings. I do think dropping into VR spaces for certain types of work throughout the day could become “a thing” and I don’t think we are actually that far off.

Facebook’s mistake was thinking they could spend billions to leap ahead to the goal, while simultaneously not being able to communicate to even their own employees that goal and why it’s meaningful.

I think there are generational advancements that take time to happen no matter how many people are “working” on it.

I also tend to think as a team goes from 100 people to 10,000 the other 9,900 are just making work not doing work, unless you can split up the problem into extremely well defined components that will end up snapping together properly and run them as 100 separate skunk-work projects.

Fundamentally, a cartoon world doesn’t help me get work done. But I can imagine customer support, content moderation, traffic control, all the real-time kind of twitch-based jobs out there could probably design an immersive VR interface which is a lot more efficient and fun to work inside than a desktop environment.

So many real-world tasks that a wearable AR screen could potentially assist with, whether it’s learning how to fix something around the house, or learning a hobby.

I recently learned to scuba dive and got my PADI cert but definitely still have a lot to learn. Could I one day put on a BCd (the diving vest) and a pair of VR goggles and do immersive training courses, or preview a dive?

I am learning guitar, I could imagine VR or AR goggles helping me get better but it would require a lot of custom software and UX.

I also like the idea of being able to put on the goggles and connecting with an expert that sees what you see and is in your ear waking you thru something, for times when software alone doesn’t cut it.

I just can’t help but believe there’s huge value to be unlocked and better ways to communicate, collaborate, and entertain and that we just need to cross a usability and ergonomics threshold which isn’t too far off and people will actually start getting comfortable and engaged in these settings.