If the past two years have shown me anything, it's that people are becoming skeptical of the technologist mantra that "technology will make people's lives better." Not always; and with Apple introducing Screen Time and people trying to figure out how to "break" from their cell phone and social media usage, I think anybody who believes that the mass market wants to live in some VR simulation is tone deaf.
Maybe AR will never be like Minority Report, but I think if AR could get to a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would like to believe.
When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems in the first place.
If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
That being said, I am skeptical of the claim that VR will be orders of magnitude more popular than AR, simply because humans instinctually do not like to have their vision occluded.
> If you asked people before the age of cars how to improve transportation, they'd ask for a faster horse.
This is a made-up quote, and what they would have asked for was a faster, warmer, safer carriage (which they got with cars), a faster cart (which they got with trucks), and a lower maintenance horse (which they got with motorcycles.) Nobody wanted horses; they used horses to move carriages, carts, and themselves.
True, but the is also a flipside. Technologists solved the transportation problem, but introduced health and urban planning problems as a result. The point is that people are becoming more savvy at spotting the downsides of technologies. In particular, using VR will probably result in more sedentary hours, which is something that people seem to want to move away from.
The most popular VR games require significantly more physical activity than traditional video games (https://vrscout.com/news/man-loses-138-pounds-beat-saber/), so if VR does take off it could be a solution for sendentary hours, not a cause.
As t→∞, you could imagine technology improving to the point where VR headsets don't feel like they're occluding your vision. The holy grail would plugging directly into your brain to replace your ocular input with a digital feed.
Of course I'm talking about a sci-fi future here, nothing that's on the horizon in the next 10-20 years.
Maybe AR will never be like Minority Report, but I think if AR could get to a point where no goggles are needed, or if the equipment is light enough to not be a burden to the user (unlike VR headsets), then I think AR will be much bigger than VR. The average user just don't want that crap on their face and they don't want to live in a simulation like so many in the Bay Area would like to believe.
When people talk about the Bay Area/Silicon Valley monoculture/hivemind, I immediately think of VR enthusiasts. I'd also throw cryptocurrencies and blockchain enthusiasts into this category as well. Both of those technologies solved "problems" that the general population wouldn't agree to being problems in the first place.