Head-Mounted Displays Aren’t the Future Of VR

Mobile phones in the 80s were incredibly expensive and bulky, the connectivity was sporadic and low quality, but their fundamental utility for communicating with anyone by phone nearly anywhere you carried one was immediately and universally obvious. This use case was so valuable, that early adopters were willing to put up with their many shortcomings. (Especially when they, say, wanted to conduct asshole business calls from the beach.) And as that early adoption market grew, mobile phone quality improved and the cost began to go down. But it’s important to keep in mind that the unique use case for mobile phones was immediately and broadly obvious.

Nearly a decade into the new generation of VR, that’s still not the case with HMDs. Gaming and game-based socialization remain its main use case, but even there, it’s not unique: Most gamers are perfectly happy to play on their consoles or PCs. Or even more likely, of course, on their mobile phones.

— Wagner James Au, No, Virtual Reality is Not In Its “Early Days”

As the article states, HMDs have been around in various forms since the 1960s. But the majority of those early uses were to augment the wearer’s perception, not to replace it.

I think this is the big hang-up that is causing virtual reality to stumble along as a niche activity. Many people have latched onto the idea that the virtual reality portrayed in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash is the ideal, ignoring the small matter of that world being a dystopia.

Meanwhile, there are virtual worlds aplenty, going back to the 1980s, which grew from the technology that was available at their inception. That many of those remain in existence and are populous? Because users were given free rein to make the world their own, create and share, and make their own stories.

(Case in point: I celebrated seven years in Second Life this past February. No headset required.)

I suspect that the future ‘virtual’ reality will be a hybrid of mixed and augmented reality, one that adapts to people’s devices and connectivity and lets users lead the way. In the meantime, I expect we’ll see the HMD Graveyard grow ever larger.