The biggest impediment for VR is the fundamentally asocial nature of it.

If there are fewer headsets in a room than there are people, it’s going to be awkward for at least one person. Trying to help someone debug something in their headset without me being able to see what they see is a problem (granted, this could be solved by software).

Having to share headsets sucks. You have to faff with head straps, adjust IPD, focus. I’ve had exactly one evening where everyone had a headset and things worked well for everyone involved. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of events filled with awkward moments, setup issues, problems, where everyone is continuously taking the headset off and need to figure something out. And this was while working for a VR company where everyone was quite computer and VR literate.

Reflecting on it, it felt kind of like 90s and 2000s LAN parties, before the days of DHCP. Randomly copying values around, IP conflicts and not understanding subnet values. Good times.

I do wish someone attempted a ground up AR OS where experiences are shared to nearby users by default. AR versions of airdrop are pervasive, that sort of thing.

For example, think of the opposite of Apple's People Awareness feature. Instead of an immersive experience fading away when a person comes near, the AR user's experience fades in as you approach.

I think it would be pretty magical, honestly. One of the wow moments the public never got to (because of adoption rates) is a shared AR experience. Really compelling stuff.

The only thing I regularly used a VR headset for, was to join clubs and socialize in VRchat during covid lockdowns. So VR provided an avenue of socializing when there were no better options. VRChat is still growing and up to 70k peak concurrent users.

These are valid points but the upside of vr is still much bigger than the current downsides. The ability to explore worlds as if you're actually there is something no other medium really offers.

Are video game consoles "fundamentally asocial" because there are likely fewer controllers than people in a household? Are computers, because they only have one mouse and keyboard? The existence of VR chat suggests it handles social gaming just fine.

I can think of a lot of impediments to VR (the weight of the headset and vertigo being the biggest) but needing everyone in a room to share a single headset at the same time seems like an extremely fringe case. The real problem there is just the cost of buying enough headsets.

I completely disagree. A lot of people lead pretty solitary lives explicitly when it comes you how they spend their time with technology. There is a lot of solitary phone, computer and video game time these days.

I think the biggest impediment is just how bulky they are. If we can make them so it’s just like picking up and putting on a pair of lightweight glasses, the same way you pick up a controller, I think that there would be a lot more uptake, especially in the gaming space.