VR is a conveyance. As a medium, VR is a mode of transportation. It has more in common with a car or a teleportation system than it does a video game console. Once you separate this idea from the bulky “headset” everyone sees and the “metaverse” terminology Mark Zuckerberg has tried to brand everything as, you can understand that the decade from 2013 with Oculus Rift DK1 to Quest 3 in 2023 was a critical period of research necessary to develop the core technologies behind the dominant transportation system of the 21st century.
In this framing, you have to dig into the history books and the founding of companies like Ford and Chevrolet to put headsets like Vision Pro and Quest 3 into their proper context. You can’t call early cars like the Model T and Chevrolet Series C Classic Six failures and you can’t do that either for the first attempts at Meta or Apple or Google or Valve to realize mass market teleportation via bulky headsets.
Would you rather drive a Model T or a Porsche 911? Everyone agrees on the Porsche but you only get to the Porsche from the Model T through hundreds of intermediary steps. Every VR product of the last 15 years has been one of those steps. Quest will be remembered as the first all-in-one VR device you could walk around in. Vision Pro should be remembered as the first with teleportation as its central focus.
Meta’s big reset this year was a shift to take what Apple shipped in 2024 — the same thing researchers at Meta said required miracles in 2022 — and stuff it into the shape of glasses. What comes next should be the first sports cars of VR.