The real headline is that VR is finally confirmed to have hit a major roadblock. If John Carmack gets frustrated with its progress, there's something up.

I've long thought that the issue with VR is a conceptual one, not a technical one and maybe that frustration comes from there. "Running forward" is an unsolved problem in room scale VR. For a seated experience, you're basically back to a neat display gimmick + accurate hand tracking.

Any real solutions need, on the one side, real-world physical constructions (think running threadmills) that soon hit holodeck-level limitations and, on the other, software that actually benefits from the real technology VR brings to interactive media: super accurate hand- and head-tracking. The first gets impractical/impossible soon, the second limits development to a few niche genres: Shooting ranges, cockpit sims, dance/party games and some vague "experiences" where the actual tech is pretty much ignored and you just say "but it feels so immersive!" (honestly, it does work for horror games!). It's basically motion controls 2.0.

The only place I could see the technology shine is, oddly enough, AR. It has way less mainstream hype to it but it makes much more sense because you actually benefit from the tracking of your real-world movement: You're still a part of it! The holo-lens demos that pop up on youtube might seem clumsy, but I can totally see a use case for replacing physical monitors with arbitrarily sized and positioned displays you can virtually move in any office space. There's rumors of Apple working with Valve on AR tech. If there's any technology that could follow the smart phone, AR is my bet. I'm honestly surprised Carmack didn't move in that direction rather than deciding to become a general AI guru.