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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

it's going to take a lot of marketing to get people to accept VR in large numbers, too much dystopian sci-fi that instantly makes people not interested. When I look at those headsets I instantly think some combination of The Matrix and Brave New World.

But maybe Zuck knows about some forthcoming propaganda campaign to focus on getting people to use VR to distract from income inequality, putting the majority of the population into the digital world seems like the best way to distract from real world issues

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Well it's interesting having teenage kids.

Because while the adults are all busy pooh-poohing it, this tech is rapidly penetrating in that market. Which is to say, something like 80% of my kids friends have access to / use VR routinely. And it's 100% Oculus/Meta.

I have no doubt that kids (and the young at heart) are having a ball playing VR games, but the real question is whether there's compelling use cases outside of that, of the sort that Meta is constantly trying to highlight. Meta is banking that there is.

So far I haven't seen a compelling mass market use case outside of games (which is a relatively niche market), but if you open up development tools well I suppose the hope is that someone will come up with something.

> whether there's compelling use cases outside of that

Indeed, this is the billion dollar question. It's very clear there are compelling use cases but the really obvious ones are niche industrial uses, commercial applications etc. So the real question is compelling mass market use cases.

The two mass market ones that are apparent at the moment are fitness and virtual office spaces. Fitness is already well on the way, virtual office use is still tenuous and really needs hardware improvements to get off the ground. Those improvements look likely in the next generation of hardware so it's going to be an interesting 24 months to see whether it takes off or not.

The elephant in the room, as you point out, is that neither of these match Faceook's supposed aspiration to create a Metaverse. So I see Facebook/Meta's ultimate success here being dictated heavily by how fast they can get over that and target the real mass market use cases as their primary focus.

Live entertainment will be a massive market for VR once camera, AI, and VR tech gets there.

This is what FB did during one the Nets games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq4JMWcnUCw

Just look at the comment and you tell people are interested, If they can improve the quality on this. This will be a huge for sports fans, especially fans in different countries/states that can't go to the games.

Now expand this across music events and other events. You have a massive TAM.

I think it's more the cost and awkwardness of the headsets and the lack of any "killer" apps that are holding VR back, moreso than dystopian sci-fi.

Do you feel the same way about headphones? I think headsets are basically headphones for eyes. I can listen to low fidelity 2d sound from my laptop speaker, or I can put on headphones, noise-cancellation and immerse myself in 3d audio. I think eventually we'll come to see vr headsets as essentially the same

The Quest 2 sales numbers are in the ballpark of the new consoles.

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