There is definitely both luck and uncertainty with regard to R&D. If you don't look, you won't find it, but looking is not a guarantee. In the case of AR/VR, I

There is definitely both luck and uncertainty with regard to R&D. If you don't look, you won't find it, but looking is not a guarantee. In the case of AR/VR, I think there are two issues that make payoffs uncertain: 1) the hardware would have to get much cheaper; when will that be? 2) What is the killer app that would motivate the (large) expeditures required to produce compelling virtual environments? Games is an obvious case, but games are a very different beast than online meeting rooms -- the whole action/reward cycle of games isn't likely to work for business meetings. It isn't really clear that VR adds enough value to be compelling for non-gaming apps. But it could easily be true that we just haven't imagined the right use case. You won't find it if you don't look.