5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next?

I like that this article recognises the key use case of exercise as a &quot;killer app&quot; while other applications develop. After the novelty wear&#x27;s off, most games lose their interest. While there are a few novel game mechanics, there aren&#x27;t as many as you would think and the impracticality of putting on a headset and isolating nature of it mean that it fails to break through as an activity that keeps you using it with a high level of regularity.<p>But exercise is not like that. It has real advantages especially for people not well situated to access other exercise options. Because the headset is intrinsically motion tracking you it knows a lot about your motions and can really feed that back and closely integrate motions into scoring mechanisms etc that gamify exercise in a way that isn&#x27;t possible through any other means. But best of all, it&#x27;s an intrinsically regular activity - it&#x27;s a reason to use your headset every day for an hour or more - something that easily tips it over the value proposition needed to justify buying it.

I stopped using my VR headset more or less 6 months ago (HTC Vive). I put quite a bit of energy into making very simple prototypes of a VR table-top strategy game I had in my mind. I photogrammetrically scanned my room and superimposed it into a VR environment to get an AR feeling. And then a whole bunch of other half-baked projects and experiments. The Unity VR headset developer packages are really quite powerful, and you can build anything you like.<p>To me, the limitations are very simple - these things should be smaller, the processors running them have to be more powerful, and the interface should rely on precise live hand tracking for UI. The neural interfaces arę awesome R&amp;D-wise but I can’t imagine them stealing the show.<p>I imagine these companies have forecasts on when this tech will be ready at desirable price points. At the moment I’m liking the rumors on the Apple headset - it would seem they’re shooting for a much more expensive device and to me this makes much more sense, especially considering their existing high-quality wearables etc.

Probably NFTs will make these useful...