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I agree. It's obvious this technology has a big future, the question is, outside of the current $3500+ niche marker, when? The Oculus Rift was created in 2011

by Ologn 3y ago

I agree. It's obvious this technology has a big future, the question is, outside of the current $3500+ niche marker, when? The Oculus Rift was created in 2011, id Software was demoing it at E3 2012, and in 2016 consumer versions of HTC Vive and Oculus Rift launched, as did Microsoft HoloLens and Google Daydream. As it improves, I don't question that it has a future, and some people like it so much they're working on it and writing apps now. The question is how many years from now before a larger mass of people are using it? The OP talks about the Internet, but the Internet started some time between the 1969 first ARPAnet transmission and 1974 paper on the Internet protocol. Out to 1993 most people were not consciously using the Internet, it was a rather niche thing. With the release of the Netscape web browser in 1994, the inclusion of IP networking capability in Windows 1995 etc., this began to change. One could say this about AI as well. Up until 2019, Norvig and Russell's CS textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" had only a ten page sub-chapter on neural networks. The now recognized as groundbreaking 2012 ImageNet competition victory by Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton, was greeted with skepticism and disinterest on this forum ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611830 ). The ideas for connectionist AI were there starting with McCulloch and Pitts 1943 paper, so that's a lot of development where things still weren't really happening until around 2012 or even 2019. Some people can see the potential in things decades in advance, but they can take time to move into the mainstream, and it is difficult to determine how long that can take.

MBCook 3y ago
Lots of companies had made “smart phones“ before the iPhone came along. The iPhone is what blew the market open. Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded. You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL. There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors. Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac. Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is. But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.

by Ologn 3y ago

MBCook 3y ago

Lots of companies had made “smart phones“ before the iPhone came along. The iPhone is what blew the market open. Other companies had MP3 players for a few years first. The iPod exploded. You listed some good examples yourself. Windows 3 was nice but it was 95 that really made it big. The Internet existed but it was Netscape that made it takeoff, followed by AOL. There’s always an invisible threshold. You can make something in a category but until it passes that threshold it doesn’t really change the world. It could be price, speed, ease of use, some new piece of technology, or a combination of all those factors. Existing VR headsets obviously sell well enough that an industry exists, but it’s nowhere near ubiquitous. It hasn’t hit that threshold (assuming it exists for VR). Apple clearly has set their own bar, much higher than others, hoping that they’ve hit that magical point or at least gotten close enough to it. Today that cost a lot of money like the original Mac. Going from the quest one to the two to the three has increased sales but I’m not sure it’s done anything to really approach that magic inflection point. Who knows how long it would have taken to get there. Maybe the quest four or five would, maybe the eight. We still don’t know where that line is. But Apple is really pushing and that makes it interesting to watch if nothing else.