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Comment by apexkid | Hacker News Reader

Oculus and other VR headset. VR as a technology is fascinating and almost Sci-Fi when it came in but people quickly realized that there are still no practical applications for the technology other than mild gaming and entertainment purposes. Companies invested heavily in VR but the ROI is poor till today. VR is mostly a one time experience for people and not something they spend time with everyday.

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It's because most people are only associating it with gaming. And media outlets measure its success by checking if it is capturing the gaming market. But VR has applications beyond that.

I mean, there is a new art form that let you paint in mid air. How are artists not all over this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW49IKs1kE

A technology doesn't have to be something you spend time with everyday to be successful.

There's a huge barrier to entry for any of the possible applications that most people just don't want to risk. For art, it costs $10 to download photoshop, but it costs an average person $500+ (computer hardware and headset) to get into VR. There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.

I'm only seeing good things about VR gaming, though. It's definitely becoming more popular there. Lots of people seem excited for the Steam Index.

> There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.

I would say Goro Fujita is a well-known artist for his illustration work and he's now doing almost only VR pieces. https://www.instagram.com/goro.fujita/

What a weird thing to say a couple of months before the release of oculus quest and valve index

One of the founders is a neighbor.. $20m later. They lucked out with FB/Zuck frothing over their company so early.

I wouldn’t call it luck. Sure, the money is good, but their company is now essentially dead and should never be trusted to do anything good (just like every single thing Facebook does ends up having nefarious goals behind it).

Luck only in the sense of how early they were as a company and the premium Facebook put on them.

I still wouldn’t call it luck. Their company and product is now dead, and any good use they envisioned for the product is now forgotten in favour of nasty and user-hostile use-cases.

I really wouldn't say that VR failed. The market seems to still be consistently growing, if slowly, and people who use it generally seem satisfied.

FWIW I was really skeptical about VR at the peak of the hype but now I'm waiting on a good opportunity to buy a headset myself.

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