> Railroads, semiconductors, plastics, networking... the utility was there for all of them, and so was the potential profit.

I wonder why so few people make the comparison to the recent VR hype. We heard the same things there about its unlimited potential, how it's inevitable that we will soon resolve all its shortcomings and that it will become ubiquitous.

I still believe VR will eventually live up to its potential, but no one can deny that bubble has popped after Meta took a huge loss on it. It took too long to resolve the hard problems so the timing didn't work for them.

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tliltocatl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The major problem with VR is that it simply doesn't have a good use case beyond the initial wow effect. AI certainly does.

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abroszka33 an hour ago | parent [-]

With AI VR does have usecases.

AI can maintain the multiverse and administrate it. Everyone can create just by talking.

Coding would also be a good usecase, to see the architecure in 3D and talk with Claude, point at stuff, pick him up and put him where the work needs to be done.

I think it's a match made in heaven, AI is just still way too slow an expensive for this.

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crote an hour ago | parent [-]

> Everyone can create just by talking.

Okay, but why would they? And who's going to consume?

If anyone can trivially create, every creation is meaningless. There is no billion-dollar business in abandoned Minecraft servers, so why would this suddenly change when you force people to put on an expensive VR headset to visit them?

	▲	tim-projects 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> If anyone can trivially create, every creation is meaningless. Everyone has always been able to trivially create. We live in an attention economy, not a creativity economy. Meaning you can create crap (or ai slop) and people will consume it if you know how to get their attention. Attention is what gets money. Creation is just fuel for attention. Quality is a part of the equation, but much less important than people generally believe. Here's a legacy document explaining all this since long before ai or the internet was around: https://archive.org/details/TheManualHowToHaveANumber1TheEas...

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m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It didndump a lot of money into it, improving some things and headset availability. But arguably a most of it went to useless stuff no one asked for, like paying developers to build shovelware for Quest or their useless corporate Metaverse.

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signalToNose 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dot com crash is a mush better comparison. Over promise and under delivery in a immature market.

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petesergeant 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I wonder why so few people make the comparison to the recent VR hype.

AI is already a gigantically transformative technology, with a staggering amount of paid consumption, and virtually everyone I know uses it every day, where I don't know anybody who regularly uses VR in any form.

The ship has absolutely sailed on "is AI a world-changing technology", where "are the leading AI companies worth what's been paid for them" is a completely open question.

	▲	mook 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		AI is transformative _doesn't_ mean there isn't a bubble. Online shopping was transformative too, but there was still a dot com bubble. Amazon survived, Pets.com did not.

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light_hue_1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because VR failed to deliver at all. The experience is narrow, isolating, and frankly pretty horrible. People get motion sickness. The set of games is limited never mind the set of non-gaming activities. AR similarly has a lot of issues like narrow FOVs, low resolution, and brightness issues.

VR is a toy with a few very narrow areas of application in industry. That does not describe the current status of AI.

	▲	m4rtink 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		VRChat is not really isolating.
	▲	wolvoleo 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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