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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts
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I think the confusion begins with your statement that Meta didn't "learn their lesson from Second Life." What's the lesson they should have learned? Why should Meta have learned a lesson from something they didn't own?
The big lesson from Second Life to me is that it's a novelty for 95% of potential users, and a fixation for a few true believers.
VR and AR are in that era of radio in the 1920s, or personal computers in 1977. They're interesting, people might gawk at one for a little while if given access to it, but right now, the long-term audience is going to be primarily enthusiasts who are passionate about the technology for its own sake.
We're still waiting for a lot of details to snap into place to make it broadly appealing:
The hardware and setup needs to be turnkey. Newer kit is getting a lot closer, but I think it's going to be hard because you have to factor in things like "setting up a wide enough floor space to avoid injuring yourself when using it" and "we haven't really resolved that this gives a fair number of people violent sickness"
There need to be killer apps. Some of the VR experiences seem like they'd be fun, but eventually exhausting. It's sort of like the motion control (Wii/Kinect/PSMove) trend-- people enjoyed them, but it seemed like it burnt through quickly, rather than becoming a core part of new gaming experiences going forward.
AR likely has an easier road to "killer app" because it can be applied to a bunch of vertical use cases; I'm picturing a fry-cook with a heads-up display that tracks how long each patty has been on the grille and its internal temperature, for example. Even if mainstream consumers never buy AR gear, there might be a million devices sold to businesses. Makes me think of Windows CE; the consumer launch was muted, but it was on a billion scanner-oriented devices for years.
"There need to be killer apps" you say, but have you looked at the VR titles on Steam etc?
There are already a lot of fantastic VR games. Touristy cities even have VR gaming arcades where you can pay high prices to play on their VR kits.
The main barrier to wider adoption is the high price for good VR equipment, and the runner up is probably the complexity of setting up and using the systems. So yes that's similar to PCs in the early days, maybe like the 90s were with PCs and the Internet.
While there may be good apps, I tend to define "Killer App" as a specific program that people not already in the ecosystem will explicitly buy into a hardware platform to run. The classic being VisiCalc for the Apple II and Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC. On the gaming side, think about how many millions of Game Boys were sold so people could play Tetris; one suspects a significant number never saw another cartridge in their life. Or, perhaps less hyperbolically, Halo got a lot of people onto the Xbox platform, and FF7 did the same for the Playstation.
Does any VR title have the same degree of wide awareness and demand those programs had at their peak?
I could imagine someone trying to force the hand by moving a beloved franchise into VR-- imagine if the next Dragon Quest was VR-only, for example, and people who buy everything with that cute blue slime on it would also buy cute-blue-slime shape headsets. Meta has the resources to buy such a situation into existence, but it might not be what they're after because it's likely to still be only a narrow draw-- they're used to building a platform for All The People, not just the audience who followed a single beloved franchise over.