When will virtual reality take off? The $100 bet.
About four years ago, Professor Daniel Lemire and I made a $100 bet on how quickly virtual reality would reach a broad, mainstream market. Specifically, my side of the bet was, Virtual reality hardware (not counting cardboard) will not sell more than 10M units/year worldwide before March 2019. He bet that it would.
In early 2020, we decided to wait settle the bet because it looked like there was some chance VR would reach 10M units/year in 2020. Because of COVID and people looking for entertainment at home, Valve s release of Half Life Alyx, Supernatural (the VR exercise program), and big pushes on consumer VR by several companies, we wanted to wait and see if it was off by just one year, if 2020 was the year.