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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

Zuck has been throwing tens of billions of dollars at VR and it still hasn't gone mainstream.

At what point do you decide that the market just isn't there for the product - or, at least, the market will forever be restricted to fairly serious gamers and sundry small other specialized business applications (eg architectural visualizations)?

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It's significantly closer to mainstream since the quest 2 than before. I never saw a VR headset on retail shelves before, and I never heard kids talking about it at all. Now both of those things happen to me occasionally.

Perhaps I’m getting old, but back in the day it seemed like that when a consumer product was going to be a hit, “everybody” would want it watts and all because the good parts were so compelling people would put up with the rough edges.

I mean, I remember when Wolf3D was first released. Some aspects of it - the low-resolution bitmapped NPCs, for instance - were clearly stopgaps. But the over experience was so amazing you were prepared to ignore that.

With virtual reality, the argument seems to be “if we just polish it a bit more it’ll be a compelling consumer product”. How many more years of polishing is it going to take?

With VR I feel like it’s a bit different since fidelity is the product - unless the experience is near real life levels of realistic, there’s not much point. We’re probably a couple of generations away from that, VR will seem a disappointment until one day it’s not.

We play video games that aren't anywhere near real life levels of realistic. IMO the main issue with VR is it makes you feel nauseous

Bad/unoptimized VR makes people feel nauseous. I've never heard of anyone getting nauseous from a polished and performant VR experience like Moss or Beat Saber.

In beat saber you stand in one spot and objects come towards you in a narrow field of vision.

In a lot of VR games you move your character around while you do not and that is what causes a lot of nausea. If games have to be like beat saber for VR/AR to be successful that’s damning.

I think the Quest2 with its cellphone graphics utterly crushing PCvr put that argument out to pasture. 20 years from now standalone VR is still not going to be near real life levels of realistic.

... wolfenstein 3d sold less than a million copies...

I feel the hardware is already here, it’s the lack of users and software at this point. I struggle to think of what massive hardware improvement could be needed.

I still struggle to see a future where VR/AR headsets don’t have 50m users by the end of the decade. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Quest3 be a sleeper success once the wave of interest generated by Quest2 materializes in the form of new software.

If the market _does_ work and Zuck gets to own it like Apple and Google own mobile, then it's worth the gamble. You own a "pane of glass" and control and tax all of the commerce through it (unless regulators finally wake up).

The whole endeavor also comes with a great failure mode: Zuck also gets to own lots of the spatial computing, rendering, and multimedia future. We're getting glimpses of what games and films will look like in a decade or two, and it's nothing like what we're used to experiencing today.

Not to mention the industrial applications of spatial computing.

I think he's a genius for investing in this, even if AR/VR/XR fall completely flat.

Uber lost 38B so far and still going on with their product: https://uberlosses.com/

Uber is the public company that has lost the most money in the past 5 yrs (in the US).

Second most is Carnival Cruise Lines.

The military just gave the go ahead to Microsoft to continue developing their HoloLens. I would say it's a fairly big player on this.

The military has been throwing money at VR and AR for decades, and will continue to do so because fighter pilots need HUDs, but most of us don't pilot F-35 fighter jets for a living.

This. The question of whether VR/AR finds profitable markets is a separate one from whether it becomes a mass consumer phenomenon on the scale of social media.

...the Internet was also a military project, turns out it also has a little appeal for the civilians.

I was arguing against the idea of only being used in "sundry small other specialized business applications".

So much of computing is still about being chained to a chair and table, using an ill designed keyboard layout, with a pointing device that only really kinda works in 2D. This has had imense repercussions on how we use computers today, it has alienated outsiders for years.

We're at a point where people prefer to search for things rather than using the UI. At some point, certainly, we gotta start questioning how ** stale we are with user interfaces.

I'm sorry for the rant, long day!

Nvidia has thrown billions at AI and it hasn’t gone mainstream … people around 2017

What did they spend billions on that didn’t align with other workloads? I think they spent billions on enabling GPUs to become general purpose chips. AI was the workload that came along. Will be interesting to see what the VR workload is that we don’t yet know that blows the roof off demand

Toyota has thrown billions at fuel cell cars and it hasn’t gone mainstream - people around 2017.

Not all bets that look crazy pay off. Sometimes they’re just bad.

And isn't that okay.. Toyota needs to take risks if it wants to be around in 100 years

In this particular case, yes. Battery EVs will clearly win over fuel cell

People are free to sell their stock and invest in a different future tech.

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