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Head-mounted VR hardware will never happen, says Neal Stephenson - who coined the term ‘metaverse’
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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So, the issue is basically that a lot of people
I think including Stephenson, given his portrayal of the Metaverse in Snow Crash
expected that the bar was getting viable VR headsets, and then getting over the hump of writing enough initial software, and then it'd just explode.
The thing is that we have VR headsets that more-or-less work for playing VR games. We don't have as many VR games as we do games designed around conventional hardware, but they're out there. But...we haven't really seen that explosion. People haven't said "hey, I'll drop maybe $300-$1k to have a larger FOV with more peripheral vision, some additional immersion, and the ability to use my head as an input."
Like, you're saying "I can get a VR headset and play VR games in 2026", which is true. But the state of the field is just nowhere near where advocates hoped it would be.