>Yet most people didn't want a cellphone until the late 1990s

When they became affordable rather than stupendously expensive status symbols.

Humans rarely reject technology so long as it's affordable. Smartphones are the perfect demonstration of this where the DRIVER for them was the ordinary person, not the corporate executive who's had them since the 70's/80's.

Also you mention the PC market and televisions - as far as I'm concerned the same happened there. The home computing market of the 80's was about AFFORDABLE computers in the home, and homes scrambled to have them once they were affordable. Whether that was Atari Pong, a ZX Spectrum or a NES, it wasn't ever a market that people "didn't care about".

Same with TVs, to be honest. I don't know what makes you think the "limited programming" had anything to do with it, it's actually almost impossible to find someone of that generation who DIDN'T have a TV.

And the same will happen with VR... now that there are £300 VR headsets, people are buying them in the millions.

It's about affordability and practicality. VR headsets never went away, they've always been around, but they've always been too expensive or clumsy (I speak as an owner of multiple Vive Pro's). People know exactly what they want and what they'll use them for, it's the "fitting on the head of a pin for the price of a Christmas present" factor that actually brings them to the point people will use them.

And with VR, we were discussing VR back in the 80's, VRML was invented before HTML 2, it was shown on TV programmes, used by architects, incorporated into military headsets, and featured in mainstream movies (e.g. Tron, Lawnmower Man).

MR is a bollocks term attributed as some kind of new extension to VR and AR as if it's something different to AR. It's not. In fact it's so woolly that there's no real definition of how it differs to those two, or what it adds to either.

People are using VR now. Nobody really wants / uses AR and the biggest use of it is in chaperone systems in VR. If you're going to enter another world, why would you want it on top of this one? And MR - as Meta are finding out - is the thing that nobody actually knows what it means, because there is no real fixed definition, it's whatever these companies try to sell it and universally looks like bad AR slapped over bad VR but then mixed with some primitive VRChat bollocks that was literally available in the 90's.

To say that this is going to "be" something is a nonsense. And it can't "be" anything without cheap, commodity VR and AR hardware first. Something which we're only JUST making the first happen. Fact is, people still don't want to dress up like a prat just to "feel" something that's in front of them anyway.

A VR-first console with cheap headsets would have created a new generation of games and games consoles, for instance. But Nintendo missed the boat and went for the Switch, and everyone else is just making PCs and now realising that they should really just sell those games on PC because they are *just* PC games.

MR isn't a thing anyone wants, or can even define, demonstrate or sell. That's why Meta keep failing on it, and nobody else wants to enter that space. VR is not only well-defined, it's available, it's commodity, and people know precisely what it is - from sci-fi. Hell, we're still making TV programmes about the concept - The Peripheral - for instance.