Awaiting its iPhone moment | The Economist

From a timely VR market reality check

"For the time being, VR remains a promising technology, worth watching closely, but still in a primitive incarnation. The offspring of today’s VR systems will be ubiquitous in 2030, by which time current devices will look as clunky as the folding camera-phones of 2001 do today. If the smartphone is anything to go by, the rise of VR will wrong-foot incumbent technology giants and turn obscure startups into household names. Sci-fi novelists have already sketched out a bewildering range of uses of AR, from head-up displays for soldiers to virtual jewellery that is drawn around the wearer by other people’s headsets. Such fiction provides a helpful guide to the potential impact of this emerging technology which, like the internet and smartphone, promises to touch every field of human endeavour. Just not very rapidly."

Awaiting its iPhone moment | The Economist