>Back then, we all imagined that by the next decade, we would have 16K photorealistic high field of view VR

People are working on this. Companies like Pimax already did 8k (well technically around 6k but whatever) and ~170 FOV (near human level) back in 2020 and they are pushing for ~12k and full human-level FOV (200 degrees) with their next headset.

So funnily enough, yes we are actually still on track to hit 16k by 2026; within a decade of the first gen VR launch.

It's just really expensive (thousands of dollars for headset only, and you need top end thousand dollar GPUs to power it), which relegates it to a small enthusiast market, which is the problem: the top end stuff is not the mass market stuff.

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Facebook switched their focus from this high-end enthusiast market to go for mass market appeal (because their business model relies on getting as big a user base as possible) which ultimately means commoditizing the tech that was ultra-high end yesteryear.

This is what's making it look like the tech has stalled: but if you think about it: their 2020 headset was basically using smartphone hardware to power what needed a top-end gaming PC in 2016, and at a fraction of the price. That's progress.

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As for AR, that's also coming. The difficulty with AR is that the way we were going about it needs a quantum leap in display tech to solve being able to display things at variable focal lengths.

Companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft with hololens explored the limits of what we could do given the limitations of current screens. And they were awful.

So research groups like CREAL are now working on this next generation for varifocal AR, while companies like Facebook and Varjo are going the opposite way with scanning the real world in real time and rendering it on screens. Jury's still out on which would work best, but either way it's progress.

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Point is, there's a lot of progress going on in the VR industry right now. It's just scattered and most of it isn't mass market.