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Comment by fredliu | Hacker News Reader

It's great that Vive has gained such traction (I personally contributed to that number), but I don't think VR has "hit it" yet. I think what Vive offers today is a good indicator of what would become the norm in VR in the next few years (assuming big companies keep pouring money in), when mass production of low cost equipment that provides experience similar to what Vive can do today. Low cost device + pretty good (but may not be the top notch) experience is what's needed for VR to really take off. Cardboard is trying to do that right now, but honestly it lacks a lot on the "pretty good experience" part.

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Agreed, this is the iPhone 1 right now (like when it was $500), only early adopters / fans / developers will grab the higher end systems for now (although, the PSVR coming out later this year might change that a bit). But those people will show their friends and they'll start watching and then Gen 2 comes out, cheaper and better, and it takes off.

Cardboard/Gear (to some extent) is like a flip-phone for VR. Without positional tracking, it barely qualifies as VR imo, and honestly one of my fears is that people will try Cardboard/GearVR and assume that is all that VR is and will be turned off.

I think these large companies will continue to throw money into this for a while, hell look at all the news last week from HTC.

The problem with this comparison is that the iPhone 1 was supplanting phones that could do little more than call or text. It could do at least those things so there was no loss (except for monetary) to buying an iPhone over maintaining the status quo. Eventually the tech got better and better and the value of the phone shot way up against its price.

But a VR system needs software and is useless without it. If there aren't many users, they're not going to get software. If there's no software, no one's going to buy more units. If people don't buy the units, the manufacturers won't eat the cost to continue making them. Then we're back to square one.

If manufacturers really want this to work, they either need to pour tons of money into first party development or developers need to charge a lot more money for the games. I don't see either of these things happening, so I'm not holding out much hope for this generation of VR either.

You could argue the poor battery life and lack of third party apps as a significant detractor.

Totally agree on the potential damage Cardboard/Gear can do to VR. I had a friend who tried Cardboard he bought for $20, and his comment was "it really was just worth $20, or less".

I think this is the Newton or Palm Pilot right now. We've got years before VR is really an iPhone level thing (and yes I've used a Vive).

I don't think we can tell if its the next iPhone 1 or of it's the the next Segway.

I take your point, but that's really not a great comparison. I somehow doubt Segway sold 100k units in a couple of months on their initial release, and definitely not many would have been directly bought by regular consumers.

I think what you said would have made sense a few years ago, the Palmer Luckey's kickstarter was first created. But right now, I'm pretty sure it's way past Segway territory. Not quite iphone 1 level yet, but perhaps equivalent to the first huge blocky cell phones. Still took a few years for cell phones to miniaturize and become cheap enough for everyone to own one, I'd say that's where we are with VR/AR right now.

I actually just meant to point out some things launch splashy V1s and can still end up as commercial successes without transforming the world. I know it's sacrilege around here, but VR ending up like the current era of segways (hoverboards, which sold something like 3 million units at $300 last year) seems like a reasonable place that VR will end up after it matures (so just a novelty that tons of suburban teenagers get for Christmas, not world changing technology for adults like smartphones were)

Ahh good point. I'm a bit more bullish on it than that though, mostly because I imagine VR merging with AR in the not too distant future, and I believe AR will be as world-changing as smartphones, if not more so.

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