In 2024, the global virtual reality (VR) headset market contracted year-on-year for the third time in a row — by 12% in quantitative terms, according to Counterpoint Research. The transition from the third quarter of the year to the fourth was especially dynamic: let us recall that in the USA, the Apple Vision Pro headset, long awaited by fans of the “apple” brand, went on sale in February last year, in China (including Hong Kong), Japan and Singapore — in June, in Western Europe — in July and in the Middle East — in November. In other words, due to the magic of the cult brand among its fans alone, one should have expected a gradual rise in sales across the entire global VR headset market from the third to the fourth quarter — which also includes generous pre-Christmas discounts and promotions. But no: in Q4, Last year, Counterpoint Research claims, 5% fewer gadgets of this kind were sold worldwide than a year earlier (when retailers did not have any Vision Pro in stock). Not only did Apple’s share in this segment of the IT market collapse from 9% in Q3 to 2% in Q4, but its main competitor, the extremist Meta*, instead of 65%, now occupies 84% of the segment in question. The current situation can hardly be called anything other than a failure of the Cupertino company in one of its most promising areas.
Shares of brands offering VR headsets in their total global shipments in quantitative terms, %, for Q3 (left) and Q4 2024 (Source: Counterpoint Research)
It is logical to assume that even ardent Apple supporters were frankly disappointed in the Vision Pro, and that is why the headset, which had been in development for several years, never “took off”, dragging along with it the entire segment, which had previously languished in a rather deplorable state. Indeed: according to The Wall Street Journal, these gadgets not only failed in sales volumes (less than half a million of them have been sold globally since the start of deliveries to retail chains, although a much larger number was initially expected), but also left an extremely unpleasant aftertaste in their not very numerous buyers: “Why, actually, did I pay 3.5 thousand US dollars for this, excluding local taxes?” The list of complaints about the device is quite extensive, from its excessive weight (600-650 g depending on the modification – yes, as it turns out, this is a lot if you wear such a gadget for a long time!), which begins to cause discomfort to the average user literally after an hour and a half, to inconveniences with a limitation of the field of real vision. Let us recall that the Vision Pro is a headset, strictly speaking, not of virtual, but of augmented, or extended, reality: its translucent visor simultaneously acts as a screen, which allows the user to combine digital and physical objects in front of his eyes. So, the excessively forward “blinders” on the sides of the gadget allow, of course, to constructively simplify the visor display, without making it either composite or excessively curved, but to perceive real objects to the left and right of you, especially in motion, and especially when the movement occurs around the user (during rush hour on a crowded street, for example), aspractice shows that in this case it is extremely inconvenient.
However, undoubtedly, the main complaint of users about Vision Pro is the lack of killer apps, applications that would be so successful and irreplaceable that by the very fact of their availability through this device (exclusively and only through it!) would compensate for any physical and psychological inconveniences. Already in mid-2024, analysts noted that buyers of the gadget for the most part abandoned it literally after a few uses – when the feeling of novelty disappeared and it became obvious: this expensive toy does not offer anything that could not be done with a smartphone. Yes, augmented reality is also possible in a smartphone, when it takes pictures of objects in the surrounding world with an external camera, and the application running on it superimposes various virtual entities onto this picture (does everyone remember Pokémon Go?) It is not surprising that a year after a rather loud start of sales from a marketing point of view, American owners of Vision Pro are putting their devices on sale on local analogues of Avito and Yula with a hefty discount of almost half the original retail price – for $ 1,900 – if only the headsets do not gather dust on the shelves without any prospect of further use. And this, we repeat, is a gadget of augmented, augmented (AR), and not just virtual reality: the range of potential areas of application for it clearly exceeds that of “pure” VR headsets.
So, it turns out that true virtual reality is still far from us, and at the current level of technology of interfaces designed for immersion in it, it is practically completely unattainable?
Apple Vision Pro, profile view: The “blinders” are indeed impressive – they should definitely interfere with interacting with physical reality while moving (source: Apple)
⇡#Trick your brain if you can
A well-developed imagination is one of the hallmarks of Homo sapiens; it enables us to create vivid images of what we hear or read before our own mind’s eye. However, the vividness of such images is not so material as to seriously confuse them with reality – it is no accident that the ability to confuse dreams and reality is considered evidence of the vulnerability of the mind: either on the border between sleep and awakening, or under the influence of illness, severe mental shock, or the use of substances not recommended for over-the-counter use. Man is invariably drawn to the most realistic, fully felt experiences of narrative (consciously organized by someone according to certain rules, deliberately created for the perception of other people), and not natural (running its own objective course, regardless of this very person) origin. It must be assumed that this very attraction manifested itself in prehistoric initiation rites, ancient mysteries, the first theatrical performances, medieval carnivals, etc. It is also embodied in the highly developed visual forms of art today, in particular in interactive digital media – in computer games first and foremost.
But the gaming space is inevitably limited by the display; and no matter how huge and curved it is, you still can’t completely isolate yourself from the real world by looking at the monitor. A separate problem is the lack of tactile feedback with virtuality, but it seems that it won’t be possible to solve it properly until effective (and, of course, non-invasive — who needs extra holes in the skull?) neural interfaces are created. We’ve already talked about the difficulties that arise along this path of high-tech development. VR headsets seem to be good in this respect: they don’t go inside the head, and they immediately cut off their wearer from the outside world, allowing the brain to focus on the interactive narrative broadcast to it in the virtual space. So why do they, even in the most advanced versions available today, only cause fatigue, boredom, and disappointment in users? Are there some purely technical details missing that will sooner or later be invented, debugged and integrated, and then we will live the life of Ivan in digital worlds, or is there something fundamentally wrong with the headset approach to virtual reality?
Wheatstone’s reflecting stereoscope presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1838 (Source: Antiq Photo)
If we do not take into account the very early technical means of immersing the viewer in virtual reality, such as panoramic painting (technical ones; medieval cathedrals with their huge ceilings, elaborate decor and lighting through mosaic windows also helped to break away from base reality, but they acted primarily through consciousness, not through physiological perception), then the direct ancestor of today’s VR headsets can be considered the stereoscope invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone. True, it demonstrated only static images, prepared in advance in the form of complementary photographic or hand-drawn stereo pairs, but even those made an indelible impression on contemporaries. By the beginning of the 20th century, stereoscopes had become a relatively common phenomenon – even in cinematography, and in the 1930s. In Stanley G. Weinbaum’s science fiction novel Pygmalion’s Spectacles, the most natural virtual reality headset was described – with a demonstration of not only a moving stereo image, but also smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. In 1957, the world was introduced to the Sensorama Simulator virtual reality kiosk by Morton Heilig: its user, sitting on the seat, holding the control handles and resting his head on the console with a pair of eyepieces (old-schoolers at this moment probably remembered the Soviet slot machine “Sea Battle”), could experience almost complete immersion in the skin of an inveterate biker. Experience how the asphalt belt rushes under the wheels of his non-existent motorcycle (which, despite the fact that it does not exist, vibrates quite noticeably), how the engine roars, how the wind blowsface, wind, and in addition, to inhale the aromas appropriate to the moment. Of course, to shoot a suitable video sequence, a 3D camera was needed – Heilig also invented it. Alas, despite all the advantages of this clearly ahead-of-its-time unit, there were essentially no extensive areas of application for it. The reason, in fact, is the same that led to the fiasco of Vision Pro: they approached, tried, liked – but it got boring very quickly.
⇡#The dawn of hope
In the 1960s, they tried to adapt the Sensorama for training pilots, high-speed train drivers, heavy construction machine operators, etc. — it is clear that it was not only motorcycle tours that could be filmed with a stereo camera — but the fundamental lack of interactivity deprived this kind of simulator of any meaning. Yes, it conveyed the sensations of a ride or flight, but exclusively passive ones. As entertainment, if you take into account all the overhead costs, the pleasure turned out to be excessively expensive; and for those who operate this or that equipment, sensations alone are not enough — they also need to practice their own active actions. Then, in the 1960s, Heilig came close to resolving this contradiction by patenting the Telesphere — in modern terms, essentially a virtual reality headset. The Telesphere Mask structurally represented a long-known personal device for viewing stereo slides with a head mount. Only in front of the eyepieces, instead of paired slides forming a three-dimensional picture, miniature television kinescopes were placed. From the “Sensorama” here migrated servomotors generating vibrations, fans for creating the effect of an oncoming air flow and odor generators (containers with pre-prepared aromas). From here it was literally just one step to full-fledged interactivity: if at that time it had been possible to organize the transmission of control signals between the “Telesphere” (at least tracking the turns and tilts of the user’s head) and a pair of television cameras transmitting a stereo image to it in real time, it would have been possible to conduct, for example, virtualexcursions to the remains of sunken ships, descending (remotely, safely!) into the mouths of volcanoes, etc. But, again, the imperfection of contemporary technologies put an end to this first serious attempt at headset immersion in virtual reality.
Left: Sensorama in motorcycle rally mode. Center: Operator with Heilig’s stereo camera. Right: Telesphere, almost a VR headset (source: mortonheilig.com)
The sixties of the last century did become the time of the appearance of the first interactive head-mounted displays (HMD) – one of these is the development of Philco Corporation called Headsight: practically the same “Telesphere”, but with magnetic sensors of the user’s head movements in space. Information from the sensors was transmitted to a motorized tripod with a video camera, which tilted and turned it accordingly. Headsight was not created for entertainment, however – the military needed a device that would allow one to look with one’s own eyes into places where, for safety reasons, a person is undesirable to be present. In 1965, Ivan Sutherland unveiled his version of an HMD, The Ultimate Display, which was supposed to be not just a means of displaying computer output (which, after all, was perfectly fine at the time with a teletype – a much more compact and convenient device than the bulky, low-resolution cathode-ray monitors of the day), but a window into an unprecedented digital world created by that very computer. One day, Sutherland dreamed, fully aware of the paucity of technologies available to him at the time, “that world will look like the real thing, sound like the real thing, move like the real thing – and you will be able to interact with it just like the real thing, and it will feel completely and utterly real.” If the inventor had not read Pygmalion’s Spectacles, he was certainly thinking in unison with the author of this half-forgotten novel.
A further development of Sutherland’s ideas was the “Sword of Damocles” created by him and three of his students in 1968 at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – a bracket with the first ever genuine VR display that was connected to a computer, not a video camera. Too heavy to wear on the head, this design was attached to a ceiling suspension (hence the name, referring to a well-known ancient legend, and the experimenters initially nicknamed the bracket that) and also tracked the user’s head movements. But on miniature CRT displays located before the eyes, it showed him not a television picture of physical reality, but a virtual world built – due to a lack of computing power – from “wire” contours of software-generated objects (wireframes) – they could be viewed from different sides: the perspective changed depending on the position of the observer’s eyes. A scientist from the University of Wisconsin and at the same time a computer artist Myron W. Krueger added genuine interactivity to this whole area – in 1969 he created a series of art projects in which the computing system responded in one way or another to certain actions of the user in the digital environment. Later he called this digital space, with which a person interacts through special interfaces, “artificial reality”, artificial reality, and the term has since taken root, although today the phrase “virtual reality” is more often used (introduced into wide circulation – it is still not very clear whether it was invented orpopularized in 1987 by Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research).
Left: The Sword of Damocles in its working position; right: a closer look at the head-mounted VR headset it was holding (Source: MIT)
In the early to mid-1970s, Kruger’s earlier projects evolved into the digital interactive space VIDEOPLACE, which was also created as an art object, and not as a commercial device for working or gaming access to virtual reality. Thanks to sensors that determined the position of the users’ bodies (yes, there could be more than one at a time), CG graphics and projection equipment, the computer formed and animated digital images, perceiving gestures or the very movements of people in the space it controlled as control commands. One of the VIDEOPLACE installations turned out to be quite practical, however: thanks to it, people in different rooms interacted via the same computer with digital contours — essentially, avatars — of each other, thus anticipating both the emergence of multiplayer online games and the entire modern direction of VR communications (and without any headset, mind you!). It is also interesting that already in the 1980s, Kruger, obviously realizing the fundamentally limited variability of the algorithmic approach to the direction of visual arts he had chosen, used up to 25 different software modes to enliven his interactive space, which were activated randomly in response to certain user actions. But at the same time, he complained that he “was never able to achieve the goal I set — to develop a program that could learn on its own, from its own experience, in a way that was independent of humans.” He would definitely like modern generative AI as an independent digital actionist!
⇡#What went wrong?
The last quarter of the last century lasted, as many people believed then, under the sign of the inevitable, literally any minute now, arrival of real virtual reality – in fact, that is why dreams about it still manifest themselves so clearly in books and films based on the works of authors who were growing up or had already reached maturity at that time. In 1979, the well-known McDonnell-Douglas, one of the pillars of the US military-industrial complex, added VR elements to the helmet intended for pilots – or rather, the HMD – VITAL, essentially turning it into an AR headset: rather primitive (in the form of letters, numbers and simple lines), generated by the on-board computer, but very useful on the route and in combat, information marks were superimposed on the instrument panel and the view outside the cockpit glass observed by the pilot through the visor. Around the same time, developers began to more clearly understand the difference between VR and AR and seriously took up the creation of specialized controllers for the former, since the user of the latter can quite well work with a regular keyboard and mouse; in any case, he continues to see them. Thus, in 1982, the first VR glove with finger tracking, Sayre, appeared. Strictly speaking, its development began in the late 1970s, but it took time to find the optimal design for the bending angle sensors for each finger – in the end, they settled on light guides and photocells. In 1987, a similar product, DataGlove, was brought to market by the already mentioned VPL Research; in 1989, it also released the EyePhone (sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it?) – a head-mounted stereovisual VR headset. Complex systems integrating virtual reality helmets/glasses with the correspondingcontrollers, were created in the same years by the US Air Force for training pilots (Super Cockpit), NASA – for astronauts (Project VIEW), Virtuality Group and SEGA, independently of each other, – as gaming machines for group VR entertainment in gaming arcades. In 1993, the same SEGA offered a prototype of an inexpensive personal VR headset (and what a democratic one – with an expected retail price of about $ 200; for comparison: for the EyePhone they asked, depending on the configuration of the proposed system, from 10 thousand to 250 thousand dollars).
Thanks to the EyePhone and DataGlove, interactive multiplayer entertainment in virtual space was already available in 1989, such as arranging furniture models in a computer-generated room. Who said “no fun”? The furniture is digital, meaning it’s weightless! (Source: VPL Research)
In short, the cult first “Matrix”, released in 1999, was perceived by many VR enthusiasts as almost a documentary from a frighteningly close future – everyone was ready for the inevitable, slightly frightening, but so attractive total immersion in virtuality. However, the notorious millennium passed; the 2000s came, then the 2010s – nothing particularly outstanding happened on the virtual front, although PC performance grew very noticeably from one processor generation to another, not like today, and displays were steadily improving – weighty cathode-ray tubes were actively replaced by thin, light, compact liquid crystal matrices. In 2012, on the Kickstarter website – mind you, not in the depths of some successful IT company! — the Oculus project was born, which a couple of years later was bought by the then not yet recognized extremist company Facebook*, now Meta*. In the second half of the second decade of the 21st century, other similar developments began to appear, the most famous of which is HTC Vive (bought, by the way, in early 2025 by Google). At the same time, the first rumors began to appear about Apple preparing a VR headset under its own brand, which, in the opinion of experts at that time, would immediately give a powerful impetus to this entire segment of the IT market and bring it to some unimaginable orbit (as practice has shown, alas, no). And there seemed to be enough virtual reality applications: popular games acquired VR mode support, VR simulators appeared that were not very accessible to the average user, but breathtaking activities such as deep-sea diving or guillotining. In addition, pricesVirtual reality glasses and helmets weren’t exactly outrageous – it’s not for nothing that Forbes magazine declared 2019 “the year virtual reality took shape.” So why is the VR segment now languishing in such an unenviable state?
Experts give different opinions; most likely, all the reasons they name are weighty to one degree or another. The first one that comes to mind is, of course, the price: the already mentioned $3.5 thousand excluding taxes for a VR headset, even with the silhouette of a bitten apple on the case, is too much for the vast majority of consumers. And the Cupertino company should not be blamed for greed: it seriously tried to create the best-in-class (without skimping on components) gadget for immersion in augmented reality, but in the end it mixed the needs of two potential audiences – private and professional – and the cocktail turned out to be not very digestible. The problem is that for the most part, IT products are sold, albeit with some modifications, through two channels at once – retail, aimed at private buyers, and commercial, for business clients or budget organizations. This is true for PCs, servers, any computer components, printers, monitors, smartphones… but not for VR headsets: there was no commercial niche for them. Augmented reality devices are a different matter: they have many worthy applications in medicine, construction, oil and gas – in 2024, their global sales were estimated at $ 10.77 billion. In AR glasses, computer-generated elements perform auxiliary functions: for example, an unskilled seasonal worker at a gas pumping station lost somewhere in the tundra can be specifically explained by a qualified engineer from the “mainland” via a satellite communication channel how to fix a certain emergency situation. Namely, which valves to turn at what angle, whichbuttons in what exact sequence to press, and during the expert’s explanations, the necessary controls will be highlighted right before the performer’s eyes, and arrows and other marks will appear above them, which eliminate the possibility of an accidental error, thereby eliminating the need for an expensive specialist to personally fly out/visit the site – this saves the customer considerable money over long periods of time.
The Moverio BT-300 AR glasses, intended for commercial customers, have been produced since 2015 (and this is not the first or last model in the series); (semi)transparent Si-OLED displays with a stereoscopic effect are used to form the image generated by the Intel Atom X5 processor in the wearer’s field of view (source: Epson)
And since such application of augmented reality is more convenient and reliable than performing all the same operations (even with the same arrows and color highlights) on the screen of a smartphone, which the worker will have to hold in his hand, and even precisely aimed at the desired valve, commercial AR headsets and applications for them are relatively widely in demand and undoubtedly self-sustaining. But they are quite simple, even primitive; implementing exactly the necessary minimum of functionality and not aiming to make their wearer even accidentally confuse physical objects with digital ones. But as an addition to the ordinary life of an ordinary consumer, their usefulness is not so obvious, which is again confirmed by the example of Apple’s AR headset. At least, if you choose to pay three and a half thousand dollars for a futuristic gadget – or pick up a smartphone to perform the same augmented reality application on it, using its camera and its display – it is crystal clear what the overwhelming majority of users will prefer.
⇡#Too shallow for diving
Another important factor holding back the rapid growth of the VR market is the “seasickness” that many users experience; motion sickness caused by a number of factors. Human eyes are highly accurate and extremely sensitive instruments; that is why our brain instantly registers the slightest inconsistencies in the visually observed picture of the world. For example, up to 40% of cases of motion sickness from VR studied by doctors were caused by a discrepancy between the personal interpupillary distance of the headset user and the standard distance chosen by the designers of the device (and the ability to adjust the interpupillary distance to suit yourself instantly increases the cost of the gadget – see in this regard the previous point, “retail price”). Another type of inconsistency is an excessively high signal delay: if it exceeds the standard minimum perceived by a person (about 0.1 s), and the picture displayed on VR screens changes after tilting/turning the head not immediately, but with this very noticeable delay, nausea is almost inevitable. Again, low-latency computing hardware and displays with extremely low pixel response times cost the manufacturer more, and the buyer again has a choice: spend less on more affordable VR glasses (buying a blister or two of motion sickness pills for insurance) or allocate an additional budget for immersion in virtual worlds.
But in the early 1990s, there was a whole VR gaming console, the Nintendo Virtual Boy, which only managed to sell 770,000 units worldwide and was considered perhaps the biggest failure in the history of its developer (source: Nintendo)
The situation is not simplified by the fact that modern headsets generate virtual images for only two of the five well-known senses — sight and hearing. The so-called sixth sense — no, not the ability to see Bruce Willis in an empty room, but the sense of balance — has not yet been virtualized; at least, not in a non-invasive way. And therefore, the organism, whose eyes see that at the moment it is, let’s say, running — and not even in a straight line; with turns, ascents and descents — but at the same time the vestibular system, together with the tactile cells of the back and legs, confidently transmits the signal “I am sitting quietly in a soft chair”, records: something is wrong. Thanks to long-term evolution, such a discrepancy in data flows from different senses is interpreted by the basic parts of the nervous system quite unambiguously — as a sign of poisoning; quite possibly food poisoning. This is why motion sickness causes nausea — the body strives to quickly get rid of the food that provoked the problem.
And of course, the acute shortage of unique content, and especially the notorious killer app, does not add to the demand for VR headsets. Apple, to its credit, at least tried – and simultaneously with the release of Vision Pro, offered the concept of a “spatial computer”, a spatial computer, meaning that its AR gadget will replace a professional user – and this positioning explains both the “Pro” in the name and the recommended retail price – a personal computer, smartphone, tablet, smart watch, smart headphones and any other gadgets. The essence of this concept is to erase the line between the virtual and the real. Let’s say that a professional video editor with Vision Pro on his head is suddenly inspired; he decides to launch Final Cut Pro on his brand new Mac Pro with a 32-inch Pro Display XDR – lo and behold, he is not sitting in his office, but in a vegan coffee shop three blocks away; drowns a creative crisis in a pumpkin latte with almond milk! And what to do now – run to the workplace, risking to miss the capricious muse? Nothing of the sort: a short command – and in front of the video editor’s eyes hangs right in the air (invisible to everyone else, but he himself is in an XR headset) a huge ultra-high-resolution monitor, on which the necessary program immediately opens, pulls the necessary files from the cloud, with which work in the office has stalled, – and the work has begun. It doesn’t matter that there is no physical mouse and keyboard at hand – the interface of a compatible application is still tactile and voice, and the sensors on the outer surface of the Vision Pro record the hand movements of the inspired creator with the necessary accuracy.
The M2 and R1 chips are certainly good, but they weren’t enough to seamlessly implement spatial computing (source: Apple)
Unfortunately, this extremely ambitious concept did not justify itself in practice: two micro-OLED displays with a resolution of 4K each do not provide a total resolution of 8K (and for Pro Display XDR, let us recall, this figure is 6K), professionals still lack the familiar “mouse” interface, which provides greater precision, and the feeling of keyboard buttons under your hands too – it is convenient when you can blindly reach for the physical controls that have become familiar over the decades, without taking your eyes off the video fragment being edited. Plus, many early users of Vision Pro were sick to the point of nausea, and their heads ached, and discomfort from the striking, simply eye-catching difference between virtual and real objects in the field of view was tormenting – in short, their AR headset failed to revolutionize filmmaking, as Apple originally planned. Now it’s enough to conduct a simple thought experiment: remove the transparent visor from the Vision Pro – then it will turn from AR into just a very good VR headset – and see which of its advantages will remain, and which disadvantages will increase. Here, in fact, is the answer to the exact reason, or rather, the combination of reasons, why virtual reality still hasn’t “taken off”.
So, VR glasses and helmets are definitely not suitable for professional work, since Apple’s “space-scattered computer” did not succeed here. Watching 3D videos in them is, yes, interesting at first, but it quickly becomes boring: the weight of the head-mounted device gets in the way. Special VR films – if not interactive, then with the effect of “full immersion”, when you can literally get closer to one of the actors, look into any corner of the stage, or even beyond it – no one has yet undertaken to shoot: this, as it turned out, is very, very difficult and expensive. Plus, all the director’s work goes down the drain: what’s the point of setting up mise-en-scènes, setting up lighting, yelling at the actors on the set “look at the camera, look at the camera!” if the viewer is free to choose any position in the VR environment at any time? And cinema is still a narrative art; how the story is shown is no less important than what is shown in it. VR games? Well, if you don’t take into account a certain genre of them, which console companies avoid at all costs (and which has been thriving on PC for decades, albeit in a semi-indie state), it turns out to be about the same nonsense: dragging a visitor to a virtual world by the hand along a storyline, limiting his movements with invisible walls, is too rude; giving him complete freedom – then you won’t be able to implement any storyline in principle; except, perhaps, (semi)open worlds with procedurally generated events like Diablo II or Minecraft. But what’s the point of fighting mobs and digging the ground exclusively in the first person (otherwise, why bother with VR at all – controlling your avatar from above, or what? a guardian angel simulator?), if it’s simply not always convenient?
And here, in fact, is one of the key reasons why the Virtual Boy failed: having hoisted the heavy and awkward headset onto his head, the user, already accustomed to the picturesque multicolor and fairly high resolution of the NES and SNES pictures, found himself in some kind of monochrome, angular branch of hell – immersion in virtuality was in no way facilitated by the way it was presented here, due to the gaping imperfections of the available technologies (source: Nintendo)
So it turns out that there are simply no preferred areas of application for VR at the moment. Perhaps the situation could be saved by the notorious metaverse, but at the moment, not everything is smooth with it. Let’s add to the problems already outlined the fundamental incompatibility of platforms and virtual reality ecosystems from different vendors (which further erodes the already weak consumer base), as well as the potential internal threat from VR to its developers themselves.
After all, if it really is possible to replace any other gadget, from a smartphone to a workstation, with a VR or AR gadget, everyone will rush to buy the first one, and sales of the others will collapse; what economic sense does this make? So it seems like a killer app for virtual reality needs to be invented — investments in this area continue; the funds need to be recouped somehow. But it’s also scary to get an app that will turn into a killer for all other types of personal gadgets. So we continue to live in the conditions of an ever-postponed virtual revolution — “Player One” is clearly still not ready for anything (the film itself, by the way, was released in 2018 — right at the peak of the IT market and public expectations regarding VR).
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