As I’ve written a few times, it’s easy to say that the devices will get better, lighter and cheaper, but the question is what will happen then. How many people will care? We should be careful of saying ‘no-one will do that’ – we all do things every day that ‘no-one would ever do.’ But equally, we should be careful of presuming that everyone will want this just because you do, or just because it’s really cool. Drones and 3D printers are really cool too, but most people don’t care, and even games consoles are far from universal – on that Deloitte data, perhaps 16% of people are daily users (Ofcom, the UK TMT regulator, has more detailed data for the UK here).
Something can be amazingly cool and part of the future, but not a big part of the future. I don’t know what xR will be, and I don’t think we can know today, but we do know that this does not have any kind of mass-market product-market fit yet, and doesn’t seem close.
