I think to make 3D VTT really shine, it needs cheap and fairly ubiquitous AR tech, the kind that Microsoft was mucking about with 10 years ago with Kinect and Hololens. But at less than $200 a pop. Especially if one can manage mixed reality.
AR and VR both just keep swinging and missing, over and over and over, have done for my whole lifetime and I'm 47 man, because it's a solution looking for a problem, and not willing to wait the tech is so good it might become viable, because that might mean a competitor got there first. The last 10-12 years, even single year we've had to hear about how it's NEXT year that VR/AR becomes big. Oh obviously that thing we were told was going to be huge by a zillion breathless head-empty articles failed! Everyone one knew it would! < furiously deletes articles saying it was a sure thing > But look at this nearly identical thing! Now this is going to work!*
That's been the hallmark of a significant and perhaps increasing proportion of silicon valley tech and software for the last 35 years. At least one of three errors is made, often more than one:
1) Instead of identifying an actual problem, an actual need, an actual gap in the market based on real consumer desire or solid unmotivated research or the like, a company or even a sizeable proportion of Silicon Valley and VCs who invest in software and tech psychs themselves, via echo chambers and backpatting into believing, with huge certainty, that there's gap in the market, that's a tech people desperately want. Bonus points if it's not a linear improvement on an existing tech, but something entirely new. They bring the product to market, and the sort of enthusiasts who always buy everything their neophilia is pointed at, buy it, the companies claim it's going great... and... POOF the bubble burst, the illusion fails. Then it's everyone's fault but the tech companies and the VCs. "People just aren't ready" is the usual one.
2) A real problem is identified, a real need, a real benefit - but it's small and specific and doesn't justify huge investment, really a specialist firm rather than a big generalist should be dealing with it. But then self-psych-out starts, and they start coming up with reasons, often
obviously spurious reasons why instead of this being applicable to say, 5% of surgeons doing a specific kind of operation, it's gonna be used to every single medical professional, no, every professional, no everyone who does any kind of job will need this! No still not enough! Now everyone will need it and want! It's the new iPhone it's always the new iPhone! Never mind that, blather articles aside, the iPhone was an iteration of an existing technology, not a revolution. Never mind mobile phone usage was already rocketing upwards at an unstoppable pace and a better mobile phone was a no-brainer (especially virtually every concept in the iPhone had already been tried by another one, just clunkily). No that one device was by itself a revolution, nobody really had mobiles before that, the Blackberry was a mass delusion and so on. Our product is just like the magical perfect revolutionary iPhone we've False Memory Syndrome'd into believing was A Thing! And of course then it flops.
3) Concept is sound, but the tech ain't there, or both that and there's a missing conceptual chunk. Often you can move a smallish number of units if this is the case, but people will tend to bounce of the tech unless they have an incredible use-case. This is less delusional, but it's still a bit silly, and sometimes the tech is really, really, really not there. This is really common though - the Palm Pilot is a pretty perfect example. VR/AR might be this, but if so, despite some incredible tech and cheap tech, and even Apple getting in on it (remember that? It was last year, but feels like 10 years ago), it's consistently failed and failed to be anything more than a gimmick or niche-of-niche. Studies show over and over that people do buy them, it's not that they don't sell at least okay-ish (not amazing but units are moved). My brother has two! It's that, reliable as clockwork, people use it quite often for like, 2-6 weeks, and then usage drops, and drops, and drops, pretty fast, and get to either zero or a pretty low level. Maybe the kids bring it out occasionally to play a specific game for a year or three, maybe a super-niche-hobbyist sim guy plays an unpopular sim with it, but that's not going to cut it, especially because they eventually stop too.
So I don't think that's the issue. I think it's going to keep failing until we have something a lot more like a neural jack than VR/AR, and that might well be never. The advance of technology stopped being inevitable in our lifetimes.
* = Tech journalism is basically just Dastardly from Stop That Pigeon.
