This was a great answer: "Stephenson: My overarching answer is that the actual market and actual users find ways to do things that we don't necessarily imagine

This was a great answer: "Stephenson: My overarching answer is that the actual market and actual users find ways to do things that we don't necessarily imagine in advance, just with our own limited perspective. And so cyberpunk had a whole aesthetic about it and still does, which to a large extent, revolved around having cool shit on your face. Mirror shades. Actually, one of the original anthologies of cyberpunk fiction was called Mirror Shades. And it was easy to assume back then that in order to truly experience a three-dimensional environment in an immersive way that you needed stereoscopy, you needed to have a different image slightly in each eyeball to give you a fully three-dimensional effect. And so there's always been this linkage in people's minds between cyberspace, the Metaverse, and goggles. What we've learned is way more nuanced and interesting than that. The year after Snow Crash came out was when Doom was released, and Doom is the ancestor of all games that are set in immersive environments [Note: Tim is nodding]. And it didn't require stereoscopy. It was all in a screen - very low resolution by current standards - and yet, the magic of the illusion was that you were running around in this three-dimensional persistent environment. And then since then, that kind of experience has only gotten better. And in the meantime, we've been learning things about goggles, about headsets and what they are and are not good at. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where [input/output] lag was acceptable. And so there's kind of this long period of time during which video games on screens were getting much, much, much better, but the acceptance of headsets was [falling] behind, because if lag is bad, you're more prone to get sick. One of the things that I became aware of when I was working at Magic Leap on AR headsets is that stereoscopy isn't enough. That your brain actually uses a lot of other cues other than stereoscopy to build a map of the three-dimensional world around you. And so people with one eye, one-eyed people can still perceive three-dimensionality, for example, because of these other mechanisms. This is a kind of a long-winded way of saying that the reality we've ended up with, which didn't seem plausible in 1990 when I was writing [Snow Crash], is that we've got billions of people fluently navigating highly realistic, immersive, three-dimensional worlds using flat screens and keyboard and mouse."