The sentences about XR I’m tired of hearing

There are some common sentences, statements, images, speculations that are continuously shared in the XR communities. Those things that get repeated again and again on social media and that maybe the first time I read them were nice, the second ok, but at the 10000th are like “NOOOOO. THIS AGAIN?”. If you are an experienced member of this community, I am sure you can hear my pain.

I have decided to write this satirical post to list some of these sentences about XR that I’m tired of hearing, with a sarcastic comment on them so that I can vent a bit and have fun with you all. It could also be even funnier if you tell me what are YOUR sentences that you are tired of hearing… I’m sure I forgot many of them! Let’s complain all together 🙂

Notice that this post has been written to laugh a bit together: I respect the work of everyone, and the opinion of everyone… but sometimes mocking each other can also be fun. I hope no one feels offended by any of the statements below, that do some satire also about things that I do and say myself.

That said… let’s start with the list!

VR is dead

“VR is dead and resurrected so many times that we could make a religion out of it” is a genius sentence that someone has written to me on Linkedin. I think we are all tired of pseudo-journalists that when they don’t know what to say, say that VR is dead.

I mean, yes, it’s dead… I like to put on my dead Oculus Quest 2 to play dead beautiful games like InDeath: Unchained and have dead fun. Those journalists are dead right. VR is growing every month, and is running towards mainstream adoption as all dead technologies do. It’s like one of those zombies of action movies: it is dead, but it can run very fast.

360 Videos are not VR / Smartglasses are not AR

The best way to trigger someone from the XR communities is talking about 360 videos and define them VR, or writing a post on smartglasses, and share it with the #AR tag. The belonging of 360 videos to the VR realm causes more harsh debates than the dispute of Taiwan with Mainland China. I’ve seen many friendships end because one person was convinced that 360 videos were VR and the other had a different opinion. Many marriages have broken because of this. Someone has to stop this feud in the community: dear Milgram (and Kishino), you that have taught us what is AR and what is VR, could you tell us what 360 videos are?

I’ve tried VR… it was with one of those cardboard things where you put your phone inside

While the VR community is divided between fans and haters of 360 videos, we all agree that cardboards offered a sh*tty experience. Saying that you have tried VR because you have tried a Cardboard, is like saying that you know how it is going on a Ferrari because you have tried this…

… or that you know music because you’ve listened to the ringtone of your smartphone, or that you know Italian pizza because you’ve eaten some frozen pizza that you’ve bought at 1€ at your local discount.

Cardboard has been important to increase the awareness towards VR, but the experience it offered was… well… very discount.

Is there porn for it?

Sooner or later, whenever I introduce someone to VR, he starts asking me if there is porn for it and fantasizing about how it could be awesome.

I mean, how can you even ask this? Of course there is porn for it, this is the rule 34 of the internet!

You don’t even have to ask… maybe VR was invented just for it in the end. There was also an old fan-created video about the Oculus Rift DK1 that was all about… well, you got it… no wait, you haven’t got it, it is worse than you imagined it… it was something cringy with a young guy and a giantess… nevermind… the VR community is full of perverted people. And that’s why I love being here, of course.

Anyway, yes, there is VR porn and is also pretty popular. At the end of 2017, VR Porn dot com published these statistics that proved that people were more interested in adult VR content than on Oculus’s official website.

Of course I know all of this, because, well, a friend told me.

It is going to happen in 5-10 years

I’m guilty myself for this, I say this sentence every day. Whenever we are asked about a feature that we want for AR and VR, and we have no f***ing clue of when it is going to happen, then we say “in 5-10 years”.

AR glasses that look like sunglasses? 5-10 years
AR Cloud? 5-10 years
Believable haptics? 5-10 years
Brain interfaces? 5-10 years
Terminator and the robot revolutions? 5-10 years
Zuckerberg transforming us in his slaves? 5-10 years

I am so used to say this term that I’ve also started to say it for everything that regards my life:

Marry Scarlett Johansson? In 5-10 years
Have many children? In 5-10 years
Become a millionaire? In 5-10 years

5-10 years feels so relaxing to say because it is not that close so that to scare us, but not so distant to seem impossible. And it’s ok if we keep saying “5-10 years from now” for the same features, every year. Sooner or later, that year will come and we can say that 5-10 years before we were right. Everyone would look at us like geniuses.

[Whatever VR market analysts say]

Market analysts are those people that sit down and throw numbers in documents, saying that in 5 years (yes, they do it too) our XR ecosystem will have the value of trillions of dollars. Then they estimate the number of headsets, sales of applications, and whatever, by “a very accurate method they have developed in years”. Their method is so accurate that usually, no one of their predictions comes true, so I started wondering if actually, their job is telling us what is never going to happen.

The methods they use for their predictions usually include launching dices, coins, or examining the remaining coffee grounds inside cups. The best of them even see the numbers of the forecasts during lucid dreams.

Let’s remember one of their best predictions. For instance, this is the forecast of the analysts for the Google Glass adoption in 2013, that I used for a business plan.

It has become true, isn’t it? We all wear Google Glasses every d… ah, no.

The best prediction of the XR market I’ve ever read comes from Charlie Fink: “No one really knows how the next ten years are going to play out.“. This is the only market analysis you should trust.

I’m a Futurist

If there is a job that I haven’t understood at all is the one of the “futurist”. I mean, what does a “futurist” do? I imagine futurists like this: a person watching the sunset with the eyes of someone that has understood everything of life, and then smiling says “I think that in the future… [fill the blanks]” and be paid for it. I mean, it’s fantastic, the dream job for everyone. You go to a conference and say “I think that in the future… cars will fly!” and people get crazy

I just wonder what is the business model: do you get paid for every futuristic thing you say, like 10$/futuristic?… Are there packages, like 100$ for 20 futuristic sentences? You get paid monthly… and how much do you get paid just to smoke some weed and dream about the future? I ask for a friend, of course.

The only thing that is harder than being a futurist is being THE CHIEF FUTURIST, the job that Neal Stephenson had a Magic Leap . I mean, it should be very hard to be so futuristic that you even oversee other futurists in the future vision of the future. You live ahead of anyone else, today you are already in 3021. And it’s a pity that Neal was so focused on the future that he didn’t even notice that in the present the company had a completely wrong business model and was going towards failure. Oops.

[Enterprise company] products are overpriced

7 years that I’m in this market, and still people continuously complain about the price of enterprise headsets. A new enterprise headset gets released at $1000, $3000, or whatever, and everyone gets crazy that it costs too much, that this company is crazy, because it can’t offer the fantastic price of Zuckulus Quest: “The Oculus Quest costs $299 so why doesn’t this headset cost a similar price?”.

Because… ehm, they are different products? Aimed at different markets? With different attached services? No one would go in front of a Ferrari store screaming that their cars should cost like Volkswagens. Exactly as no one would complain that there are enterprise printers that cost $5000 when here at home I have a 3-in-1 printer that I bought for like $150. Not to mention… cough cough… that little problem about Facebook’s data harvesting… cough cough.

We keep saying this to the community, people seem to understand, and then at the next launch of an enterprise headset… there we go again. It is like living in the Groundhog Day movie, reliving the same experience again and again.

If you don’t need an enterprise product, just don’t buy it. Don’t even watch its launch conference. Just flash your head with Man In Black’s flashlight, so you even forget about its existence, and you live happily knowing that the Quest 2 is the only headset on the market.

Vivecon but it’s just business
byu/dadzy_ invirtualreality

[Headset] is the best

No, it is not, it is just the best for the purpose that you need it for. And yes, 90% of the time this purpose is gaming or porn. Or both of them.

Sometimes I just grab popcorn and watch Valve Index fanboys and Quest fanboys insulting each other on Reddit for absolutely no reason. One day we should organize a big arena, like at the good old times of the gladiators, and invite both fanboys of the Quest and the Index, provide them with toy weapons and see what happens.

We can also invite the Vive Cosmos fanboys, like… them all… those 1 or 2 people… and see them in a corner of the arena crying while slowly spinning their heads.

Guys, girls, just enjoy VR with whatever headset you like and let the other people do the same!

I hate Facebook, but it has done a lot for VR adoption

This sentence is so true… but at the 10000th time that I’ve read it, it starts becoming a bit annoying. But I’m sure that in 5-10 years we won’t read it anymore… I mean, when Zuck will control our minds with the Quest 5, we will live in peace.

When is Palmer Luckey going to ship its repair kit for the Oculus Rift CV1?

He’s working hard on it… Anduril is a company that works on AI patrolling of the US-Mexico borders just to create the technology to repair the Oculus Rift CV1. Release date: in 5-10 years, I guess. But ask a futurist, maybe he has a better estimate for you.

You have to decide if giving your data to Facebook or to the CCP

This is the classical sentence that I find on Reddit every time I publish something about a Chinese headset (like this review of Huawei 6DOF glasses)… and usually, the statement ends with “… and between the two, I prefer Facebook”. I usually answer with a meme like this

We are in an era when everyone spies everyone, and I am happily sharing my data with the US (Facebook, Twitter), Russia (Telegram), China (WeChat), Italy (my ISP), and I guess many other countries. I’m very generous. We should make a contest: every one of us should buy one of those scratchable maps and scratch all the countries of the world that have harvested data from him/her, and who arrives at scratching it all first wins a useless VHS recorder.

Sad and true story about our privacy.

No-code platforms

As a blogger, I get many press releases and pitches by startups promising “The first platform through which you can develop XR content without knowing how to code”. And it’s fantastic because it’s 5 years that every day there is always a new company that offers “the first platform” to do it. So either I really live inside Groundhog Day and it’s five years that is always the same day… or they started all together as the first ones, but some companies were shier than others, and so they sent me the pitch e-mail only after some years, or… well, MAYBE, I say maybe, no one of them is the first.

I also find a lot of irony when they tell me “With this platform, companies won’t need developers anymore”! As a developer, I’m sincerely happy of hearing this…

Blockchain & NFT + VR

During all this NFT hype, now all “first platforms” are also the first to implement NFT. NFT are used everywhere, even when they don’t have any sense, but they are the buzzword of the moment, so it’s cool to add it to whatever product, together with AI, and if you are brave enough, also 5G. “The first platform for no code development with AI smart support, NFT to define the ownership of the applications you write, and cloud rendering via 5G to go further the limits of mobile headsets”. Use this line and you get BILLIONS from all the VCs out there. But beware that someone may also add drones in the mix…

Not to mention the bazillion applications that use XR + blockchain to sell lands and that have become terrain for huge speculations…

Apple predictions

The best analysts and futurists are the ones that make predictions around Apple. “Apple is going to release an AR/VR headset around 2022-2024, AR glasses before 2030, AR contact lenses before 2050, and a resurrected Steve Jobs (the first with AI and 5G) with the body of a robotic tyrannosaurus rex before 2100”. This is the typical prediction that you get to hear, in a sea of likes and retweets.

Numbers and products of course come from the dreams they have made after they have eaten too much the day before. The funny thing is that these predictions never come true, exactly like all the other predictions we all make (do you remember when I predicted that Facebook would have never released the Oculus Link? Ops, that aged pretty badly)… so after a while the futurist that made it usually makes new predictions, changing the products, the year, maybe inventing a price. “Apple Glasses at $499 this year!” and you get millions of views on Youtube. Then if it doesn’t happen again, you say that Apple changed its plans because of the pandemic, the chip shortage, the market, the locusts… and you can try again with a new prediction soon!

Predictions on Apple are like a slot machine that never ends: you pay with your credibility and win views on your posts. I personally love when the predictions become bombastic: “Apple AR lenses in 2030” has been the best one that I’ve heard recently… absolutely believable… I mean… if Tim Cook collects all the stones and the Infinity Gauntlet and manages to bend the laws of physics maybe he can release them in time…

“Anyway, when Apple is going to launch, it is going to disrupt everything”. Probably, for sure it is a smart company.

[Whatever new VR innovative project released by Google]

Don’t get too excited, it will probably be abandoned in some years.

Minority Report interface

If you are a futurist for sure you make people dream about our AR interface in the future that is like in the movie Minority Report. Well, sorry to tell you, but that interface is absolutely unpractical: Tom Cruise moves his hand more than a Beat Saber player just to browse through some photos… if he kept moving his hands like that for the typical 8-hour workday, probably at the end of the week he had lost 10kg. That interface is like Nunchucks: cool, but useless.

The interface of the future will actually be the laziest possible: according to Facebook, the system should show to you exactly what you want to see by understanding your intentions, and you have just to confirm by moving a finger. Zuck knows you, you have just to accept his will. Resistance is futile.

These memes on Reddit

There are some memes that get shared continuously on Reddit, and they get thousands of likes every time, like if the community sees them for the first time every week. Ok, this definitely confirms that I actually live in Groundhog Day.

This is one of the most famous examples…

First time VR experience
byu/WinningRed20042 inpcmasterrace

…and also this video, that I have watched so many times that I know each instants of it by heart

This is more or less my face every time I see them shared on my social media feed

Hello everyone, from Tony The Skarredghost!

I mean, who still wants to hear this when opening a Youtube video about VR? Forget Skarredghost, he’s not good… just watch Nathie, Mike VRO, or Cas & Chary like all the other normal members of the community!

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And that’s it! As I’ve said, I’ve written this post just to spread a bit of fun… but the fun is much bigger if you also participate in the game! So, what are the sentences that you’re tired of listening to in the VR communities? And what you are tired of hearing from me? Let me know by sharing them in the comments here below or on my social media feed!