Yeah, I said this about videophones in 2002 or so. I was sure I was right. Videophones had been reinvented five times over. You could only use it at home, sitting on the couch, giving it your full attention. Who would want to have regular conversations that way enough to pay for a videophone with limited compatibility?

Now I go to the supermarket and people are holding their phones out at arm's length having FaceTime conversations at full volume with their adult kids.

Once 3-D works and integrates with physical objects it's going to be a big deal. We just keep failing at that.

Social stuff changes.

The reason I think videophones is a bad comparison is that video conferencing systems were economically successful in the corporate space well before you started saying that about videophones. There was a demonstrated value proposition; it's just that costs had to come way down for consumers to find it worth it. (Which I suspect demonstrates that that don't care very much about it, in that they pay $0 for video calls in both up-front and per-minute terms.)

But even if you were right, some social stuff changing isn't proof that other social things will change soon. It's just as plausible to me that the cost, in terms of money and inconvenience, will have to drop just as far for VR as it did for video calls. Meaning that it would have to be included in every phone or every pair of glasses for free and with approximately no additional effort to use. Which is something that we are surely decades away from.

>People keep thinking that stereoscopic 3D will revolutionize things

I'm not one of them. The revolutionary aspect of AR/VR/XR/MR/WhateveR (or, at least, one of them) is the ability to uncouple appearance or apparent make-up from function. It does for physical objects what the web did for paper.

> It does for physical objects what the web did for paper.

I don't think that's the case. The web was a pure addition to paper, taking most of the existing design vocabulary and radically adding to it through interactivity as well as by dropping the marginal cost of publishing and delivery to zero. The informational content on every piece of paper in the world could appear on a tablet the size of a slim book.

WhateverR of current and plausible near-term hardware is hugely subtractive. VR turns existing physical objects into things you can't see but might trip over. The rest at best adds a gloss of appearance, but a loss of touch, dexterity, and much of the normal interactivity of objects. I've seen interesting ideas for, say, MR board games, where you have some carefully chosen generic objects that get a visual gloss via facehugger image overlays. But I have a hard time seeing that be anything other than a highly niche experience; it's not clear that it would delivery notably more fun than games on the standard living room 2D screen. It's much, much more limited than what the web did for paper.

On the other hand, isn't it quite typical for good ideas to be recognized as such many times before the technology is actually mature to implement them properly?

Edit: most morbid example that comes to mind - flying machines.

That can be true, but you see the same pattern with bad ideas. Look at perpetual motion machines. People keep trying to invent them, but that doesn't prove they'll eventually succeed.

We could also consider jetpacks and flying cars and food pills. People have been inventing and re-inventing them for years. I'm sure if I looked I could find new generations of people taking another swing at it who haven't really reckoned with why all the previous waves failed.

> but that doesn't prove they'll eventually succeed

Of course it doesn't prove anything. But there's certainly a difference between the "hardness" of designing sufficiently high quality 3D glasses using well known technology, and doing something that breaks a physical law.

My point with perpetual motion machines isn't that good VR violates physical laws. It's that some ideas are attractive enough that people will keep trying and failing to make them real, without bothering to look at why the other attempts failed.

In your opinion, why did the other attempts fail?

My impression is that even 2D screens are still rather lacking (they're big, heavy, very bright, need a big power source, rather expensive, sometimes difficult to interact with). In many situations a book or some papers are still superior to "virtual 2D reality".

Not sure if this indicates VR is conceptually flawed or if it means we're just still early in the development of the technology.

In my opinion, the other attempts happened because people think 3D is cool. Both as a concept and as a novel experience. And the other attempts failed because they went out and built a lot of stuff based on that coolness, without testing to see whether there was lasting value.

And we certainly see that repeating here. Magic Leap burned $3.5 billion. I'm not sure how many tens of billions Meta has spent on their vision of a Metaverse. But what's pretty clear is that so far there's very little long-term usage, very little value creation.

Might it work someday? Sure. But it's perfectly plausible that it will remain a practical failure until something like the holodeck or programmable matter becomes a reality. So it could be another 170 years before VR is a success.

Stereoscopy isn't VR. It isn't even required to use it, put a person with one eye in a VR headset and they'll be able to use it's fundamental feature set just fine. It's the positional tracking that allows for perspective correct representations of anything desired that's the point. This has a lot of practical use beyond making things pop out for effect.

Stereoscopy is not the same as 6DOF. If I shut one eye in VR, it's still VR.

I agree that stereoscopy isn't the only thing going on. But are you saying there are VR headsets that don't have stereoscopic 3D, and that I should therefore change my analysis?

I think 6dof - that is spatial experiences and interactions are genuinely new.

I think any analysis that tries to lump this in with 3D TVs and View-Masters isn't terribly illuminating.

I don't think spatial experiences are particularly new.

Quake was the first game I recall playing that was intensely spatial. So much so that after a couple of hours playing I had trouble readjusting to meatspace; the positional part of my brain was still carrying enough of the virtual world that i was easily disoriented. The same thing happened to me with Minecraft. Years later, I still have vivid spatial recall of some of the bases and mines I built.

You could certainly argue that VR controllers are an exciting step forward in spatial interaction. But things like the Wii and the Switch's (less capable) motion control mean they're only a step forward, not a leap. And that also makes clear that motion control and VR are separable concepts. I look forward to seeing the fancier controllers migrate to other platforms to see how that goes.

So I think what makes facehugger VR unique is stereoscopy. And stereoscopic 3D is a thing with a long history of faddish excitement followed by a total crash. You could argue that's not relevant here, but an awful lot of VR advocates make their cases in terms of 3D.