From GamesIndustry.biz:
Speaking at Casual Connect USA today, Lasky admitted that his "intense emotional experience" while using the current high-end headsets did not convince him that VR was a smart investment within the next few years.
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"When I look at it more structurally, I'd say something that may sound a little strange: perhaps the Facebook acquisition of Oculus wasn't the greatest thing for the development of virtual reality in the long-run," Lasky said. "It set such a high watermark, and it rung the bell so loudly for the industry, that it sort of forced the hand."
Had it been Samsung, HTC or Softbank spending that $2 billion, Lasky said, there might have been a few more raised eyebrows regarding the wisdom of the investment. "But Facebook is smart money," he continued, "and it really established an arms race of sorts in that field, where all of the big companies felt that they had to have a play.
"A lot of game developers jumped in, a lot of venture capitalists jumped in. It's a dramatically overfunded space, actually, from a VC perspective."
The chain reaction sparked by Facebook's acquisition of Oculus led to the formation of "a consensus" that VR is, "gonna work, it's gonna be huge, it's the next big thing, the next big platform. I've talked to senior executives at Facebook who've told me that it's the next mobile phone. I don't personally share that view."I love that he made the same comparison to mobile phones that I made, way back in my first post on VR. And, obviously, I agree: at least in its current form, VR is not nearly as transformative a technology as the smartphones. There's just nothing that it's good for, yet; as Lasky puts it, VR is "so nascent that we haven't even figured out what we want to do with it yet."
There are many other problems that VR has yet to resolve, like the interface problem (how do you handle navigation in VR spaces, or interaction with VR objects? nobody really seems to know, yet), or simulation sickness, but VR suffers most from this fundamental issue of having no current real-world problem that it's actually capable of solving.
What actual need does VR fill, beyond the desire for impressive (if useless) tech? Most of the hype seems to surround the sci-fi future version of VR, in which headsets are much, much lighter, the interface issues have all been solved... somehow, and someone's figured out what it's all good for. The problem is that they're relying on that sci-fi future scenario to sell present-day technology, which is far, far short of that mark in almost every respect.
VR is not the smartphone. VR is expensive, riddled with unsolved problems, and even when you can get past that very high barrier to entry, it just isn't very useful. There's just nothing that you want to do, which VR makes possible, and that isn't also possible without spending hundreds of extra dollars on VR hardware. And there's no realistic possibility of that changing significantly for years yet; almost certainly not anytime during this generation of VR hardware.
Just like 3D TVs, which we were told were on the verge of revolutionizing our living rooms right up until they didn't, and now 4K TVs, which are no more likely to replace the 1080p standard that we're all using, and which is plainly good enough for everything you're going to want to watch in your living room, VR is shiny and new and useless. Yes, you should probably try it, if you get a chance. But you don't need to buy one.