> but the fact that Facebook, Apple, and Google are all dumping tons of money to develop some form of it makes me convinced that its an upcoming market that has the potential to hit big time.
Except that this belies the politics of BigCos. The BigCos are throwing money at it because a) everybody else is doing it, and nobody wants to get left behind, so it's a good bet for executives to fund b) it's a shiny new thing, so it's an interesting project that will get adoption internally from people at the lower levels who will be eager to transfer to and work on the project.
Neither of those have anything to do with whether or not there's actually a sizable market for it, but we won't know whether a market will appear for it as the market potential is nearly entirely dependent upon execution (i.e. early VR didn't sell well due to low resolution, motion sickness from low refresh rates, lack of a killer app, etc.).
It's pretty easy to throw money at projects. Coming up with something that's good enough to sell at mass-market volumes is an entirely different question.
Except that this belies the politics of BigCos. The BigCos are throwing money at it because a) everybody else is doing it, and nobody wants to get left behind, so it's a good bet for executives to fund b) it's a shiny new thing, so it's an interesting project that will get adoption internally from people at the lower levels who will be eager to transfer to and work on the project.
Neither of those have anything to do with whether or not there's actually a sizable market for it, but we won't know whether a market will appear for it as the market potential is nearly entirely dependent upon execution (i.e. early VR didn't sell well due to low resolution, motion sickness from low refresh rates, lack of a killer app, etc.).
It's pretty easy to throw money at projects. Coming up with something that's good enough to sell at mass-market volumes is an entirely different question.