If they get it better and more relevant in the future we can check again!
[1] Few as in "not enough to matter much". There can still be millions of enthusiasts, but the market predictions and "disruption" didn't pan out.
"Disruption" means that you create a less qualitative, but cheaper product that would cannibalize the margins of the product of a company whose products are high-margin (think cutting-edge CPUs of Intel). This "cheap" product will for a long time ridiculed as toy (but nevertheless sell in huge amounts because it is cheap) - until it suddenly "lifts off", becomes an inconvenient competitor, and disrupts the market.
Does this description of disruption sound like any market prediction from the last 10 years how the market for VR glasses will develop? I don't think so.
Not exclusively. That's disruption in the sense of "undercutting".
Disruption in the large also means:
"radical change to an existing industry or market due to technological innovation"
E.g. "things will change in how we do IT, entertainment, education etc due to VR".
That's because the limiting factor on VR hardware value to the consumer isn't resolution, or scene complexity as measured in polygons, or FPS, or any of the other metrics by which desktop games and game hardware are evaluated. It is latency. Latency in estimating and rendering the user's pose, movement, and viewport changes.
We would have had widespread adoption of immersive content by now if VR experience developers would be willing to sacrifice the 'traditional' metrics in favor of a ruthless focus on latency (and ideally push the hardware vendors in that direction too), but instead everyone keeps chasing "AAA graphics in a headset" , which, given that AAA graphics are (as the OP states) an ever-rising bar, can't ever really work except on whatever the current highest-end hardware is, and any experience that breaks people's willing suspension of disbelief on everything but the highest end hardware can't end up being a commercial success, any more than a multiplayer game with noticeable lag on anything under gigabit FTTH could (and for the same reason, except that the lag for VR starts with the single-player version, and only gets worse from there).
But the fact is it brings an entirely new genre of games that can simply cannot be played on a keyboard/mouse/joystick & monitor.
However you seem like someone who enjoys pretending like VR is a little fad and doesn't offer anything new to the game space- so whatever.
Whether it's absurd, tons of pundits still did tout it to high heavens, big media outlets, tech startup sites, etc. The usual BS propping up they do, like they did for stuff ranging from fuel cells to grid computing and autonomous cars at different times.
"The VR revolution", "The next big thing", "How VR will disrupt everything", "revolutionize the economy", and so on. This started around 2012 and peaked around 2016 or so.
>However you seem like someone who enjoys pretending like VR is a little fad and doesn't offer anything new to the game space- so whatever.
"Offering something new to the game space" is a spectacularly low bar compared to the oversold promise of consumer adoption and applications of VR.
And even at that, VR thus far didn't even make a real dent in the gaming space, now that you've mentioned it. So much for all the 2012-2017 hype of the tech finally being "nailed".
It's doubly funny to me, because I have memories of the first VR fad, in the 90s. At least then besides the media hype, we've also got a few camp movies out of it ("Lawnmower man" and co).