VR: Fad or Fiction?

Is Virtual Reality a growing market segment or a flash in the pan?

Back in 2012, a starry-eyed young entrepreneur called Palmer Luckey announced a new and improved head-mounted display that would be better than pretty much everything on the market at the time, and affordable for gamers to boot.

He built the first prototype of his VR headset in 2011 and announced it on Kickstarter in 2012. His prototype sparked the interest of ID Software game developer John Carmack who announced that his company’s upcoming game Doom 3 BFG Edition would support the emerging product. For the first time since the early 1990s, virtual reality headsets had sparked the interest of gamers.

Putting a digital layer in front of our eyes is possible in many ways — virtual reality is just one of them. We’ve seen games like Pokémon GO send players hunting virtual monsters in the wild, and we’ve seen Tupac Shakur and Amy Winehouse take the stage as a hologram at live events after their passing. We’ve seen new technologies merging real life with the digital realm… but virtual reality hasn’t taken off as many would have expected it — at least not in the entertainment industry.

VR didn’t do as well in 2018 as many hoped — or expected. The two most successful VR headsets — from a sales point of view — were Sony’s PlayStation VR and Oculus Go — these two, together…