> I think we are no more than two years away from an explosion of new consumer startups
I remember reading similar sentiment two years ago, back when the Oculus started getting massive attention after their successful Kickstarter.
There are counter arguments to the rise of VR. As mentioned, price and hardware are too high for casual use, but that will be fixed in time.
What can't easily be fixed is that fact that it is not conveient. VR tethers you one spot, and using VR in public looks ridiculous/antisocial to outside observers. In contrast, an AR approach can avoids both issues by embedding an immersive context with subtlety. (in theory anyways; Google Glass looked ridiculous too.)
Big screen TVs aren't convenient either - but a huge number of households have them - VR doesn't have to be exactly like smartphones in order to be very popular
You can do other things while watching TV, though, like eat dinner, talk to your friends on the couch, pet your dog, etc. None of those things are possible with a VR headset on, making it very inconvenient to use.
It's unlikely people will even feel comfortable walking through the room, since they have no idea when the VR user is going to freak out and blindly start flailing body parts around reacting to something only they can see. This means the entire living room is off limits, which is also very inconvenient when compared to someone just sitting on the couch watching Netflix.
There are a lot of social hurdles that VR will need to overcome, in addition to each of the technical ones.
I played with a Vive for a while and it's pretty mind-blowing that it's possible to do it, I also haven't bothered picking it up again. Aside from games I'm having a hard time thinking of any problem domain that would be served by VR. We've had screen-based VR going back to the 90s (VRML?) and the few applications that were attempted like virtual tours didn't really take off. I look at how little has been applied to using the Google Glass and Kinect as precedents. Even voice recognition has been going for 25 years and is barely past the novelty stage. I know the tech is still relatively new, but it's been a few years since we've had retail VR headsets and no one has come up with a killer app.
I remember reading similar sentiment two years ago, back when the Oculus started getting massive attention after their successful Kickstarter.
There are counter arguments to the rise of VR. As mentioned, price and hardware are too high for casual use, but that will be fixed in time.
What can't easily be fixed is that fact that it is not conveient. VR tethers you one spot, and using VR in public looks ridiculous/antisocial to outside observers. In contrast, an AR approach can avoids both issues by embedding an immersive context with subtlety. (in theory anyways; Google Glass looked ridiculous too.)