This isn't how it was supposed to play out.
As the COVID-19 pandemic's first wave gathered speed, and fortunate souls like me switched from meatspace commuting to tele-commuting, I started seeing more and more takes like this one, from CNBC:
Virtual reality is booming in the workplace amid the pandemic. Here’s why.
The alert among you will have already spotted the repeating pattern here: a click-bait headline that talks about a VR boom as if it's happening,
then immediately follows with a sentence that only says that it could
happen; and "analysts" with skin in the VR game, bullishly predicting that VR will grow into a multi-billion dollar business in the next five years, in a report published a year earlier, before the pandemic had even started. In short, a lot of speculation with no substance, breathlessly presented as if CNBC were reporting on something that was already happening.
We've been seeing this same pattern play out for years, in no small part because analysts like PwC have been making these same predictions for about five years now, without the predicted VR boom ever happening, but COVID-19 changed a lot of things. Did it change this one? Was this actually VR's hour, come round at last?