Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio

>Anything that plods along slowly cannot be considered an explosion

That's a pedantic distinction (not that I mind). I wasn't going for "explosion" as in "suddenly tons of people had one", but as in "suddenly there was a boom and a new viable market had emerged".

How hard is to get my main point?

Mobile got some kind of kickstart in the early 90s (I called it an explosion, but I could not care less if it's not that, that's not my point), and it never stopped going. Perhaps you'd agree if I'd merely called it "a bang" in the 90s? A starting point for big growth?

That was my point in a throwaway response I made at someone's comment that "mobile was like VR" at the start of this thread.

Whether that can be called an explosion or not, I could not care less. In my country, that's what we'd call it. There was a market that started from almost nothing before (some flat numbers in the US, almost zero in most of Europe). Unlike early 90s VR, which was a short hype in 1990 or so that then stopped.

From 1990 onwards, every year we had a big boost in the sub numbers. As I wrote, from a few dozen in 1990 (~16M globally) to ~1 Billion in 2000 (~ 800M to be precise).

That's explosive growth in my book, and I've lived several others techs that never seen such rapid growth. The only comparable thing would be the internet itself (from mostly academics in 1990 to a huge economic force in 2000). To contrast, it took 5 decades of development for PCs to get to the same point.

In any case, my focus wasn't on it being an "explosion" part, but on it never have been an "hype/unhype" cycle like early VR was. Unlike 90s VR hype (and other hypes) mobile merely went from strength to strength.

>Not the same thing. The tech simply didn't exist.

Sure, but that didn't stop the media and companies then to hype it for a couple of years. And then forget about it for 15+ years.

Here's what I'm referring to:

https://www.pcmag.com/feature/343351/the-wacky-world-of-vr-i...

It's hard for me to figure out what the right analogy even is. Is the first version of the smartphone a (non-smart) mobile phone or a PDA? In some ways the Newton is a precursor to the iPhone, and those sort of devices had an enthusiastic but niche audience and didn't seem close to going mainstream for a while.

For VR, most of the major industry players are continuing to invest (and were never expecting it to go mainstream in the last few years), and the active user count is persistently going up. The absolute numbers are relatively low. But the cost, software, and hardware right now are all pretty terrible and rapidly being improved.

With a growing base and major cost/quality improvements on the horizon it probably has a fairly secure future as a niche gaming platform. I don't think the data is conclusive yet on whether VR is the Next Big Thing.

There's kind of a chicken-and-egg SW problem for new platforms. Most of the popular mobile apps were only developed because of a large existing base of networked devices. For iPhone 1.0, the killer app was probably the ability to use the desktop web. Is there anything VR could do for normal consumers, that doesn't require enormous software investment (before there's a market)?

People watching TV/movies on their phone/tablet is pretty common (in addition to the living room). It doesn't seem too out there that VR could become cheap/good/comfortable enough to be popular for that use case (watching 2D TV on a phone). It's only marginally less social if you're watching by yourself anyway, and could even feel more social depending how the virtual theater is set up. Maybe that's one pathway that could drive more mainstream adoption.

I think it's premature to mark VR as a fad just yet, at least before not-terrible mobile systems come out. There's not too many tech products I can think of that would be popular if they could only be used chained to a $1000 desktop PC.