From Linden Lab to Meta, I see the same mindset of tecnogeeks who are building products without any awareness of why "mainstream" audiences won't adopt them.
I loved the VR experience of my Oculus Quest headset -- it was absolutely mindblowing -- but I rarely use it now. I'm not the least bit sorry I bought it, mind you, but if it stopped working today, I probably wouldn't replace it.
For me, there were several different reasons the love affair with VR faded all too quickly. The most pressing reason was lack of space. I have an old house with small rooms, and dedicating one entire room to using VR proved unfeasible. At a minimum, I needed enough swinging arm space for Beat Saber, the one piece of content I never grew tired of. I did get tired, however, of moving furniture out of the way every time I wanted to play, and even then I was in constant peril of knocking over a lamp or tripping on a cat. I'm willing to bet this would be an issue for a lot of households.
With the exception of Beat Saber, I grew tired of the content on offer. Exercise programs all required space, so same issue I wrestled with for Beat Saber. The vast majority of the rest were games, and I'm just not a gamer. I tried a few different VR chat rooms and they were a nightmare; they were far more crude and clumsy to navigate than SL in 2015. If you're going after a mainstream audience, you have to give them a reason to immerse in VR that isn't strictly gamer-oriented.
The final reason is somewhat aligned with the space issue. It's not just enough to have a large enough space without any traffic (human or cat), you also need a block of uninterrupted time. Much easier to do that when you live alone, but for anyone with family, especially kids, carving out that block when you can completely remove yourself from other people nearby is a challenge. When you're at a computer, no matter how deeply involved, you can usually look up and answer a quick question or make sure your kids aren't in imminent danger when you hear them scream in the next room. Getting out and back into VR is a much clumsier process (and somewhat disorienting, to be honest).
The realities of life, the ebb and flow of a household or even an office around every user, just don't seem to enter into any of the equations for this metaverse vision.
arstechnica.com
