Technology

The least interesting figure that's also the first thing reviews harp on and the hardest thing manufacturers push.

For presence, latency is what matters.

For immersion, FOV is what matters.

For adoption, cost is what matters.

I maintain that some absolute toy is what's gonna break the market open. Dirt cheap, immediate, convenient, and with static specs that make current owners scoff. It can have potato graphics so long as it feels rock-solid. (And doesn't make you sign in to a computer that's strapped to your goddamn face.)

The trick is gonna be intermediate representation. We're still using direct raster to bitmaps, from software. This is quite frankly insane. It's a misunderstanding of why we have bitmaps. The refresh rate of old monitors had to be kept precise or else things got fucky. Generating pixels on-the-fly worked, but it was limited by hardware speeds. Showing a big dumb array of pixels instead simplified the technology and decoupled display from rendering.

But VR displays don't need to refresh the same pixels every fraction of a second - they need to refresh the same scene every fraction of a second. The same surfaces should stay put while you move your head, even if updating those surfaces takes a moment. The modern equivalent of a simple video card reading off a big dumb array of pixels would be a big dumb array of colored balls floating in open space. The further, the bigger. If some very simple technology can guaranteeably render that at 200 Hz, then it doesn't matter how long a game needs in order to update all those balls.