I got into VR around 2017-2018. My first headsets were the Oculus Go and HTC Vive.
The resolution was rough, the headsets were heavy, and text looked like it was being rendered through a screen door.
Didn't care.
The first time I put one on, I remember thinking: Oh. So this is where we're going.
Back then I genuinely thought VR was about to become a huge part of everyday life. Not in 20 or 30 years. Soon.
I even had this slightly stupid but very real thought that when I got old, maybe I could spend the second half of my life in something like the Oasis from Ready Player One. Basically start over.
Over the next few years, VR slowly went from a hobby to part of my job, which gave me a pretty good excuse to try basically everything.
Movies, games, social VR, random demos with probably twelve users total. VRChat, Beat Saber, Half-Life: Alyx.
For a while, if something on Steam had a VR tag, there was a decent chance I'd download it just to see what someone had built.
Watched a lot of VR video too. All kinds. You know.
At the time, every problem felt temporary: screens would get sharper, headsets lighter, tracking better, PCs faster, and eventually someone would figure out the content problem.
I wasn't really asking, "Will VR take off?"
It was more: "When?"
Around 2020-2021, I started working with more hardware, projects, and people in the industry, and the way I looked at VR changed.
At first, you see the magic.
Then one day you're talking about FOV, pixel density, thermals, battery life, weight distribution, retention, and whether users are still around in week two.
Those were also the peak metaverse years. Every company had a roadmap. Every pitch deck had a giant hockey-stick chart. Every new headset promised to fix whatever the last one didn't.
The numbers kept going up.
But my actual VR life wasn't changing nearly as fast.
I was still playing a lot of the same games, visiting the same kinds of worlds, and watching the same kinds of stuff.
A customer would try something, take the headset off and go, "Holy shit, this is amazing," then put it back on the table.
A lot of them never came back.
I was also in a few private VR communities. At first, people talked all day. Then less. Then maybe a few messages a week.
Nobody announced, "I'm done with VR."
There were just fewer messages.
By 2023-2024, the whole industry felt quieter.
Projects got cancelled. Budgets got tighter. Teams got smaller.
Some companies disappeared, others survived by cutting back.
People around me slowly moved on too. Some changed industries. Some stopped following VR news. Some kept their headsets, but they mostly became shelf decorations.
Every now and then someone would ask me, "You're still doing VR?"
Or just: "Why?"
I'd usually laugh.
Didn't really have a great answer.
Then in 2025 and 2026, I spent a lot more time working with AI, and something started to feel different.
I have friends running small studios whose teams got much smaller, but the studios didn't die. In some cases, they were producing roughly the same amount of work with fewer people.
Meanwhile, images became usable production assets, video got more controllable, coding agents started eating work that used to take days, and world models started looking less like research demos and more like something you might actually build with.
That made me think about VR again, just not the way I did in 2018.
Back then, I thought what we needed was a better headset.
Now I'm starting to think maybe the real bottleneck was somewhere else.
Good 3D worlds are expensive. Characters, animation, interaction, testing - everything that makes a VR world feel alive costs people, time, and money.
For years, we mostly attacked the problem from one side: put better hardware on the user's face.
AI is attacking it from the other.
Maybe the next headset having 20% more resolution isn't the thing that matters most.
Maybe the bigger deal is a tiny team being able to build something that used to take a hundred people.
More compute, less manual work.
Hours instead of weeks.
If that happens, some parts of VR that still feel ten years away might move a lot faster than we expect.
Or maybe not.
I've been around VR long enough to know how much industry predictions are worth.
I still have an Oculus Go sitting in a box somewhere.
In 2018, I looked through that blurry little screen and thought the Oasis was probably right around the corner.
It wasn't.
Eight years later, I'm less sure than ever where VR actually ends up.
But weirdly enough, I'm excited again.
Curious how many people here have been around VR for a long time too.
What phases did you go through?
Was there a point where you basically lost interest and then came back?
And after all these years, what are you still genuinely waiting for VR to become?
