Well it might be fun, but weâre terrible at predicting the future.
VR will always be the next big thing.
Their 2015 predictions were pretty far off so I would be skeptical of these as well http://www.frogdesign.com/techtrends2015/
Call me a cynic with a chronically shriveled soul; but I find it hard to take the theory that âVRâ will mean more empathy, rather than hunting undesirables and their tainted children for sport over the Internet, hard to swallow.
According to the users of the website, ALL of these trends are more âLikelyâ than âLongshotâ! Thereâs a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow!
Until the sensors-rendering-displays loop becomes responsive enough.
I didnât see the Oculus Rift class devices yet, but hope to do so next year. Then will be able to say more.
Augmented reality, THAT will be a big thing once the displays get cheap enough.
One can wish. (I admit I did too.)
The biggest issue here isnât the trends per se. Itâs the industries theyâve paired them with. Financial services, healthcare, and education are notoriously slow to adopt âinnovationsâ for a variety of reasons including but not limited to regulations, cost, and conservative mores.
The year of VR being widely accepted in the consumer market is probably the same as the year of linux on the desktop.
Does android on tablets count?
(Do windows running in virtualization on a linux count? Some friends works for a large corporation and their laptops do that.)
(âŚand does running anything that has a browser, when the real work is done on a linux-running server with the client merely running some javascript ajax crap, count too?)
I predict youâre right.
âthe year of linux on the desktopâ was once a phrase with specific meaning but of course at that time we couldnât imagine the variety of common devices which under the hood are really computers.
As for a year of VR, I forget where but in one of Jared Lanierâs books/articles a few years back he mentioned about how VR wasnât waiting to arrive, it was already there in lots of vertical/environment specific uses. Consumerizing it for games/watching movies is about as much of a big deal as android using a linux kernel.
It actually is quite a big deal. Tech mini-revolutions usually come in two waves; the first one takes over industries and places that really need it (âseriousâ), then the second one follows when the volume goes up and price goes correspondingly down and the wide adoption occurs (âwhimsicalâ). At the latter point is where the explosion of various niche uses happens, unconstrained by the particular requirements of industry and academia, limited by just what the people themselves can imagine and can code with the libraries on hand.
The second wave is hopefully about to happen.
Does android on tablets count?
No.
Given the shift of usage patterns away from stationary desktop machines, why?
I see your general point but for reasons I still canât put my finger on, I canât see where VR goggles fit into this model. Maybe Iâm doing the (apocryphal?) â640K is enoughâ but Iâm missing the point of what might drive this to mass acceptance.
Honestly I doth think it will be games or porn, the two most common drivers of technology acceptance. Sure goggles will be used for those but there are so many examples of failed accessories which were supposed to be the next big thing for gaming and porn.
Maybe it will be like the video phone, something imagined and worked on for 50 years before it just became an invisible part of everything with FaceTime, Skype and many other video chat applications. Something you use sometimes but otherwise mostly sits in a drawer (or filesystem) unused.
It will be porn. Trust me, it will be porn.
Just thought of one other thing, it might end up like 3D movies, something that keeps coming back and keeps failing because in the end most people are uncomfortable with it.
I go for the 3d versions of movies at the rare occasions when going to the cinema. They look more immersive to me, more fun.
The recent Star Wars were pretty good.
So you use it sometimes but not always. Probably donât own one of the 3D compatible TVs or buy the 3D version BluRay discs?
Wife and I saw Avengers & Avatar in 3D but both of us got headaches and had trouble keeping the accessory âjust rightâ over glasses. Now its something we avoid, wonât pay extra for. Some people like 3D sometimes, some not at all. Similarly I usually put a piece of paper over the laptop camera for Skype/Lync, Webex calls at work. Wife outright refuses to use video chat.
So maybe VR goggles will be like that, some extra cost item that some people will use sometimes, others wonât consider it worth the cost and others will just avoid entirely.
