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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy it, and honestly I think hardly anyone else does either.

I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.

Contrast that with a VR headset. I think "This is a cool game to play for 20 mins or so", but I have absolutely no desire at all to spend any portion of my time in "the metaverse". This is fundamentally solving a problem that people don't have, and it's a solution they don't want. I have yet to see anyone (who isn't somehow paid to shill it) be genuinely excited about the potential of "the metaverse".

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> when I tried the first iPhone

What about when you tried the first touchscreen smartphone, which was probably resistive and came with a stylus?

Seems unfair to compare an emerging tech with the iPhone (which took an emerging tech to the next level) off the bat. It's almost an argument in bad faith.

When I tried my first PDA, which was before anyone had stuck a SIM card in one, I was completely blown away. I wrote an entire book on the thing, and emailed it to myself for final print template tweaks, before sending to a publisher. After writing nearly a million words on it, I was just as excited about it as when I first got it.

Probably helped that the latency of the device back then was completely unnoticeable, in contrast with today's smart devices that can't keep up with my typing on their touchscreens.

On the contrary, I remember trying my first VR headset in the 90s when it was "Max Headroom-esque", so it's a bit rich to demand that I only consider the earliest smartphones by comparison, when VR has been progressing for 30 years.

And, to clarify, I think the current crop of VR headsets are quite cool. But again, I see them cool in small units of time. I also think many, many people have come to the realization that there is too much ever-present technology in their lives, and the last thing they want is to become the humans from Wall-E.

When it comes to crypto, given how antiquated our current financial settlement systems are, I can see its utility as a backend settlement layer, but 95% of what I see peddled in the crypto space is just some other get-rich-quick scheme.

> to demand that I only consider the earliest smartphones

The earliest smartphones did not even have touchscreens, I just used an example that would be easier to digest.

I have an OG Vive, Oculus Quest, and a Cosmos with the wireless adapter. Several hundred hours of SteamVR over the course of the past few years. All that said, I can do 1-2 hours of VR every other day or so at most. The idea that this will be as popular as smartphones in the next 5, even 10 years seems crazy to me. Being "in VR" is pretty exhausting no matter how lightweight the headset is.

AR will be the next smartphone, VR will probably mostly be used for collaboration and TV replacement.

Not the person you're replying to but: tbqh I absolutely much prefer a stylus over my fat fingers.

> I remember when I tried the first iPhone in 2007. Sure, it wasn't super fast, the screen was small and pixelated by today's standards, but I remember going "Holy shit, this is amazing." It was easy to see its utility on the first use of it.

For the dumpster fire that it was (mostly imo due to hardware decisions / public perception), I had that same reaction with Google Glass.

It was super nice being able to see messages as they came in doing various tasks. Being able to ask random questions and get visual responses, rather than an assistant reading you a random snippet from the result that it thinks is appropriate. Or being able to almost-instantly snap a pic or record a quick video.

All of it felt like a game changer due to me not having to take my hands away from whatever I was doing or try to crane my neck and wrist to get my watch to display.

I think that in the coming years Apple/Google will come out with another similar device. I don't think phones as we know them now will go away overnight in favor of these devices though. But instead they will be essentially a different smartwatch form factor for a while.

Agreed. Time may prove us wrong but I don't see how it is in any way going to be the next big thing. the cell phone is something that most everyone had and needed already so there being a smartphone that can do more is an obvious next step forward and has tangible utility and doesn't require you to change anything fundamentally about yourself or your habits. requiring special and expensive basically single use kit to just get on the platform is a nonstarter for wide adoption. yeah people will use it and a subset will love it but it's not the next facebook or smartphone barring some giant leap in something that I can't imagine.

I was playing far cry today and was chatting with my wife about it. The only thing I want a VR headset for is so I can have fast peripheral vision playing games that don't have a 3rd person perspective. Other than that, I can not see a real utility for it outside of AR specific uses like utility mapping or architectural stuff. Whereas with the phone, like you, I was pretty amazed with a rectangle that had all the knowledge of the world on it.

Yeah, but the big difference is with VR you have to build a completely different experience.

iPhone already had a massive amount of apps for it as you could visit any existing website on it.

You don't have that with VR. It has to be built. Which is what Facebook is focused on. Building tools and AI to help creators build "worlds" that can be used in VR.

Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.

Your a primer league fan in the US, you can still experience the game like you are there.

All these experience will come as tech to build them gets better, but these are WAY harder problems then what the iPhone needed to solve when it first was released.

> Imagine you favorite band is playing live, they don't visit your town. You can put on a VR headset join in on the event and experience it like you are there. You friends can come along without any of you guys being in the same country.

That just sounds so contrived. You’d be paying money for that too… and it wouldn’t be much cheaper than going to see them live.

Contrived and just dystopian, really.

I don’t know…

3D television was supposed to be the next big thing. I’ve used a VR headset before and it was neat but gimmicky and disorienting. People don’t like wearing things on their head over their eyes for extended periods of time for entertainment. I hear arguments about it’s a generational thing or it’ll catch on the more you use it but those have been said before about wearables. Ears seems fine but I think there’s something very different with covering your eyes that will be a blocker for mass market appeal.

None of the mass market metaverse things people talk about are actual problems people have. Anything that is an actual problem (remote VR surgery) isn’t mass market.

I think while VR is limiting in many ways, AR does have the potential to overtake the phone if it becomes a truly seamless extension akin to donning a pair of glasses. Seamless AR might be 10 or 20 years out I don't know, but I can see the utility.

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