While anecdotal, I know of many folks in their teens that use VR a few times and then just move on. VR is a neat toy but for a lot of people it is something that they forget about very quickly.

Personally it was the same, the tech was brilliant but after you take the headset off - you just forget about it.

That word paradigm is doing so much work in this sentence. You realize we're talking about a gadget/product here, not a new system of government or medicine or locomotion right? So what you're basically saying is "some people lose the need to buy useless gadgets foisted on them by marketing".

As for a paradigm shift, we've had AR for 10 years now. With the exception of navigating a city by foot, there's zero successful mainstream use cases.

There's not a single VR game that has appealed to the masses so much as to buy a headset. Not one.

It's expensive, inconvenient, anti-social and it doesn't stick.

Smartphones for the 60+ age group was a paradigm shift. It was very difficult at first, but within 3 or 4 years, it became pervasive worldwide. Somehow I feel that AR is less of a disruption than the "swipe" mode that touchscreens introduced around 2008 or so.

There's a plethora of reasons why VR in its current state is little more than a gimmick.

No one doubts that. The question is whether this particular product will be successful. That’s not clear yet.

There is absolutely no reason to believe it so far - from all of my experience, both VR and AR are technically inferior to a screen in almost every way that actually matters, except for a short demo.

We are talking about the future.

For example, if I predicted that phones the size of a coin are the future, you could meaningfully say "in my experience, bigger phones are actually more sought after, so I don't believe your prediction".

My phone is on my wrist currently (Apple watch), I left my iphone at home. To me your prediction would have been correct (for now).

If you insist on basing your predictions on existing experiences, think of your sunglasses: light, comfortable, stylish. I predict that 10-20 years from now your sunglasses will offer great AR/VR experience, most likely through improvements in retinal projection technology. It will take nothing away from your experience using sunglasses and will add a whole lot more. Similar to traditional wrist watch —> Apple watch transition.

Your Apple Watch is still dependent on your iPhone. You're also unlikely to be browsing the web, watching YouTube, or browsing social media on your watch, and these have been the biggest factors for smartphone adoption by far - so I don't think such a prediction works. We can also see that the market for smartwatches is dwarfed by the market for phones, and this trend shows no sign of reversing.

> I predict that 10-20 years from now your sunglasses will offer great AR/VR experience, most likely through improvements in retinal projection technology.

The problem with a glasses form factor is that it fundamentally can't create enough contrast for a good quality image, especially not for VR - that requires blocking out most light coming into the eye, which no additive technology can do. I do believe that some equivalent of a smartwatch could work very nicely in a glasses form-factor (i.e. a device that acts as an accessory to your main computing devices, for small specialized tasks).

I still don't see any plausible way it could replace phones or laptops/tablets with any technology visible on the horizon. So I'm not saying AR/VR won't have a place or even be wildly successful - just that I don't believe they will ever be "the future of computing" in any reasonable sense, say like the smartphone was to the PC.

Smartphones became widespread 15 years ago, and will be obsolete 15 years from now. We will still see an old lady in 2040 pulling out iPhone 23 Ultra Super Pro Max, just like we still occasionally see an old lady in a supermarket pulling our her checkbook.

Both screens and retinal projections will be seen as historical curiosities 50 years from now, just like we now look at VHS tapes and compact disks. Provided we have not turned into unimaginable cyborgs by that time, surely any information that can be consumed by our brains would be fed directly into our brains - why would you want to rely on our unreliable, deteriorating and severely constrained senses to consume information - most (or even all) of which by that time will be created or transformed by an AI?

However, you are wildly overestimating how near brain-computer interfaces are if you think they will obsolete smartphones in 15 years.

My prediction then is this: screens on fixed devices (desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, probably other form factors) will remain the most common way of accessing the majority of our computer use for the next, say, 50 years. They will not be displaced by glasses-mounted displays, though "smart glasses" will become a more and more common secondary device in the coming decades, just like smartwatches. The only thing that will displace regular screens will be safe, high-bandwidth, high-fidelity brain-computer interfaces - which is where the 50 years timeline is coming from.

And I believe even 50 years is optimistic given the difficulty of making such a technology mass-market.

For the record, what I predict is:

1. In 15 years smartphones will be obsolete. The most likely technology that will replace them is retinal projection via glasses. Laptops and monitors will probably last a bit longer.

2. In 30 years, BCI will replace all other human computer interfaces, unless by that time humans will already have merged with computers on a more fundamental level.

As with any examples of progress in human history things will appear to change slowly until they suddenly change very fast.

What does "left behind" mean?