Sorry but VR will never die, its future potential is too enormous. It just has cycles of popularity and we might see a new surge with the Q3 being a very popular holiday gift this year.
Everyone I know who tried VR has 30 minutes of excitement and literally never mention it ever again.
Well, except of they like simulation games like flight simulators. Then they surely have already migrated to a VR setup and won't ever go back. Yes, I'm one of those.
Max around 3 hours I think, that's the longest amount of (consecutive) free time I have available.
I remember in the beginning (First version of Oculus I think?) I could play for something like 20 minutes before being tired from it. Not sure if it's because of the HP Reverb G2 I have now, or because I got used to it.
Do you spend much time zoomed in, losing the angular 1:1 mapping of the viewport? I did that a lot with a headtracker (makes you really strive for precision, I had a custom build of freetrack with generous per-pixel hystheresis), but under the headset zooming felt more wrong than expected.
I spend very little time zoomed in. Mostly when trying to pick up a ground target. I agree it feels very wrong in VR.
I would not be able to go back to standard 2D-view-of-3D experience again after getting used to VR. Can't even effectively look around your shoulder, and a bunch of other things.
Not that I don't agree with you, as someone who sold my Valve Index. I consider it to be a technology that takes a wild amount of development money and technology to basically take solved problems and put them in an interesting perspective in front of your face.
Also, I've seen reviews of spatial videos (Apple's marketing term for stereoscopic surround-y video capture) that describe them as eerily real, like you're living inside a memory. I think that may be an interesting use case (plus, unlike Apple's silly tech demo showing a dad capturing a video with a big VR headset strapped to his face while he watched his kids play, you can capture spatial video with a phone).
Comparing the windows CE devices we had in the early 2000s and the Quest 3 for instance, I think the stages are not that dissimilar: they require enough effort and compromises that the general public would not care, but there's actual real world use cases and enough companies willing to invest in the field and bringing incremental and not so incremental evolutions.
To continue to use the PDA analogy, if you went back to the mid-90s and told people "these will be everywhere in 20 years!", people would still shrug their shoulders and go about their daily lives same as ever, because 20 years from now ain't today. And when it comes to VR, we're all shrugging our shoulders.
The same way I think everyone sees smart glasses coming. We just have no idea which company will crack the nut, what will be the twist, and on what timeframe.
But that would need AR rather than VR (excessive isolation from the real world is bad), and way better resolution than headsets currently have.
With foreseeable technology VR is always going to need something that covers large parts of your head, covering at least your eyes and ears. This is fine in specific cases like gaming, but it seems very unlikely to be something everyone uses all the time.
Agreed, but those cycles are measured in decades, not months. VR had its last hype cycle in the 90's, and AI in the 80's and thus will the wheel of reincarnation continue to spin with VR and AI switching places until the sun dies ;)