Consider commercial aviation. It has seen no gains in 40 years. In fact, it slid back with the death of Concorde. Sometimes things stagnate because there's a lack of imagination, or the economics is bad, or there just physically is no way to do the thing we envision.

Stagnation has been the norm for most of human history, and we should expect more of it with things that aren't closely linked to some kind of feed-forward loop. Smaller transistors help us make smaller transistors. Better AI can help us make better AI. Better VR ... Is just better VR.

Edit: Airliners have seen some gains in fuel efficiency, and they've obviously become more computerized but these are not the kind of exponential transformations we have become used to in computing.

There has to be enough demand to make it good enough, and it has to be good enough for there to be enough demand.

As it gets better in each generation, there will be increased incentive and competition to make the hardware even better, in a nice virtuous cycle. As demand grows, there will be ever more VR titles for every niche, helping the growth further.

Personally I have high hopes for Quest 3 in 2023 and Quest 4 in 2025 (?) each being a big multiplier (1.5-2x?) for adoption.

VR was obviously here to stay, because of all the monitors we have. Mass output of cheap high resolution screens. Though, these screens aren't 8k or even more. Much less of a mass market, much less demand outside of VR.

Machine learning will do wonders for many industries (VR included) even before AGI coalesces.

The trend in cost of computing is clear, but it's not occurring in an isolated environment. Countries around the globe have been experiencing some pretty major issues in the past few years.

VR continues to be a "nice to have" product. It needs more investment and time dedicated to it before it can become as ubiquitous as the smartphone. This has been made a bit more difficult due to the various socioeconomic issues occurring recently. Companies like Meta can no longer allocate as many funds to VR as when they first bought Oculus.

We will bounce back. We will create better VR. It will just take some more time.

Moore's law is all about hardware lol. But yeah, your intuition about smartphones is correct, Moore's law has slowed down.

Rapid iteration/advancement of hardware isn't quite here yet, but we do have reason to believe it's possible (cf. additive manufacturing/3D printing). We can pump out software quickly because we've removed a lot of the bottlenecks for doing so (e.g. using IDEs with keyboards and mice rather than punch cards or manually toggling switches) and made the ability to code widely available (allowing for massively collaborative software projects).

Hardware has a pipeline, and that pipeline is pretty constricted at the moment in comparison to software, but that doesn't mean it will be that way forever.

It seems that dedicated chips for AR glasses are only now being developed and close to manufacturing. I believe ARM has a chip designed from scratch for this application. I believe with the big push for web3 and Metaverse that now is the time. Before this point there has not been corporate backing for the application. Now that every big company wants to push into this market, the funding is available.

I bet we see it accelerate heavily in the next 2-3yrs.

The software is also a big problem. VR game controls are still a general mess.

>my error is my inclination to try to apply Moore's law to every type of technology.

Nah your error is not understanding how exponentials work. Doubling every couple of years still means at the begining it takes 20-50 years to hit the inflection of the exponential curve.

Also, I can't help but think if someone like Facebook for instance had a huge advance, that they would shelve it and keep the advances at a drip pace because that will feed sales. If they jumped right to something that skipped over all of their other research they would lose out on years of revenue just edging out others. But maybe not.

• blackberry and Nokia introduced in 1998 and 1999

That was the beginning of the cell phone movement.

• The first iPhone wasn’t launched until 2007
• Galaxy S was launched in 2010

That was the beginning of the smartphone movement.

But smartphones didn’t really become polished until 2017-2022

The iPhone X released in 2017 and the android pixel 4 released in 2019 appear to me to be “peak smartphone technology”

It took a full 20 years to go from a Nokia to an iPhone X.

But it only took 10 years to go from an iPhone to an iPhone X.

• Cardboard VR was released 2014

• Oculus rift introduced 2016 (not the dev version)

• Oculus quest released 2019

• valve index 2019

• The expensive oculus 2022

Seems right on schedule honestly. Cardboard VR is the Nokia and valve index and oculus quest are the iPhone and android versions etc.

I think the sticker shock of the expensive meta vr is due to zuck price gouging the quest to try to create market dominance. VR will probably be as expensive as new iPhones.

Apple still needs to make a VR.

By 2034 VR should be fully polished for consumers.

VR gloves, walking/running and of course visual quality indistinguishable from real life.

Yea Kurzweil is way too optimistic, the guy thought (maybe still does?) That he is gonna live forever. No man. I'm 31, I'm not even gonna live forever...Ray is like 70 already??