IEEE Future Directions
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You can tell a technology has really succeeded when it becomes invisible. You no longer notice it, and yet it has become part of your everyday experience. Successful technology do not generate any “wow”, they are just there.
Think about ten years ago when the iPhone was first introduced: the touch screen generated plenty of “wows!”. Nowadays touch screen technology is no longer attracting your attention, you just use it, and it is taken for granted, it has succeeded.
Not so in the VR, Virtual Reality, case. Yes, we have better and better devices (like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View VR), but they are still “from another planet”. Similarly, we have more and more ways to create VR stages, using 360° digital cameras (now we are waiting for the one announced by Facebook in April 2017, see clip) promising to be as good as the very good ones on the market at a fraction of the cost, but again, we are still far from normality. We are still in the exceptional.
Will VR ever become the “norm”? Current fruition devices are still cumbersome and not at all “invisible”. A few commentators are considering VR a doomed technology that will not make the transition from Wow to normalcy.
In order for VR to become a seamless experience we would need a significant change in technology along with a dramatic reduction in cost. I can imagine in the next decade, possibly in its last part, that screen might become so cheap that a room in our home may become completely plastered by screens, its walls (at least, may be the ceiling and the floor as well) becoming digital windows on a virtual world. This would completely change the scenario and would also justify the deployment of fibre to the home since a Gbps of bandwidth will be just enough…
I can imagine as intermediate steps seamless augmented reality, through the use of glasses, or electronic contact lenses, and special VR hot spots replacing, or flanking, movie theatres.
