VR Has Floundered on Gartner's Hype Cycle for Over TWO DECADES

Ah, 1995! The Usual Suspects is in theaters, Seinfeld is huge on TV, Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" is booming on radios... and tech analyst Gartner is predicting that virtual reality is just over its peak in hype but well on its way to mass market adoption:

I got this 1995 chart from a great analysis of Gartner's hype cycle by venture capitalist Michael Mullany, who looks into the model's strengths and weaknesses. As I wrote last week, Gartner inexplicably thinks virtual reality will reach mass market adoption in 2-5 years, but even more mysterious is over twenty years ago, Gartner also believed VR was well on its way to the mainstream. If the 1995 analysis had been correct, you'd already be reading this webpage through VR goggles.

This isn't a dig on Gartner per se, because here's another striking thing when you look at that chart. In 1995, Gartner was basically right about every other technology they were tracking there EXCEPT for VR. Take a good look:

Wifi communication, video conferencing, and speech recognition have been mass market for the last 5-10 years or so, intelligent agents (i.e. bots) and emergent computation (i.e. machine learning) are starting to reach a plateau of productivity. As for the Information Superhighway (as a kid I vividly remember Al Gore talking about that constantly when he was Vice President), we don't use that dumb term anymore, because we already take it for granted that all human knowledge and media is available on the Internet.

All of which suggests this: If incredibly smart analysts are more or less right about the future of most technologies, but keep missing their forecast on one particular type of tech (i.e. VR), maybe the failure to go mass market is inherent in the technology itself?

Hat tip: Natasha Lomas (@riptari), who just wrote a fairly excellent TechCrunch post, "This VR Cycle is Dead".

Comments

[J]

Duh, Of course the failure is something inherent with the technology. Unlike all of the other items on that chart processors have not evolved fast enough to support VR at a level commensurate with consumer expectations. While consumers might well respond to $200-$500 regular frame glasses that provide a full immersive environment that replicates reality in real time. They are not as responsive to the lag times an pseudo reality that current bulky goggles provide at that same price point. However they do seem to be responding to the augmented reality model that allows for virtual input control over software objects in real time

[Lagomorph7]

The problem is that VR, by its very nature, seeks to completely replace the real environment in which a person exists with a virtual one. But many people do not find this an appealing goal because typical interaction with a computer does not occur in social isolation.

People often want, or need, to be at least marginally aware of the outside world. They are concerned that others in their environment might want their attention, or are concerned at how they look to others. Or even what others might be doing in their presence without their knowledge. Heck, maybe they just want to play a computer game while talking with a friend or keeping one eye on the television while sitting on the living room couch with other family members.

VR ignores all that. The VR ideal of total immersion is limited to people who are in an environment of complete personal privacy. That niche market is unlikely to get much bigger regardless of how cool the technology becomes.

[Mac]

"Previously, Planck believed that VR was an evolution of film—the next leap forward. He now believes that he was wrong: VR is a new medium, and we will be more successful with VR when we treat it as such. Film is great for telling stories in a sequential, linear fashion, while VR is an empathy machine, providing immersion and a crafted presence unique to VR. But presence is an enemy to storytelling. In VR, users need time to look around and discover things for themselves, but allowing the user to look around interrupts a story. Therefore, a story told in VR must be simpler, less dense, and faster-paced compared to that same story told in film."

Source: https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2426/

[inthisboxgoesaname]

VR never really died, people still used it and so on. It was just certain industries or people and it was faster, cheaper and more comfortable to use large screens.

Speach Recognition is a great example. Sure, it is/was used by some people, not many. Maybe not mass adopted but is now more viable. Of course, it takes googles servers working together to provide good enough service (serious cpu power and a huge database with learning AI to help get it close to right) to be good enough to have won some users over. It still isn't used by lots of people though, just inherantly hard to make work well and until tiny screen keyboards drove people crazy, wasn't really needed so much for everyday life.

Yeah, speach recognition (if google cracks it completly) may be in much larger use. But when? Another 20 years? 10? Could be 5, but it's already been so long. Sad, but gartner is identifying things to simply explore and maybe we want it to predict the future. Excuse me while I go take a drive in my mach speed flying car after downing a meal pill and I will come back and tell you all the future we will see and experience. Just a minute...

[inthisboxgoesaname]

Evolution of film? Yeah, color replaces black and white. Uh, nope. We see people still shooting in it. For mass market, maybe so. But will we truly ever see a mass market as large (percent of a population wise) in the next 3-4 generations? Things are splitting, splintering a bit and peices are falling off. Mass market Anime films at the box office? Well, maybe there will or has been some but Ghost in The Shell wasn't it. You see, there are people who are filling their time with far less of the mass market stuff and sub-culturing themselves out of time for even the mass market stuff they would like. Anyway, back to fueling up my flying car with 10c a gallon smart-fuel that feeds the whales. Damn whale overpopulation though, oh well the prices of progress.