The current principle won't be good enough. We need a completely new tech to put VR into sunglasses for it to become mainstream IMO. When Oculus kicked off, it was the time when tech had gotten smaller and easier (and cheaper) to use, and so VR was suddenly viable. But now with years of real-world experience, it turns out there are a lot of barriers no-one had anticipated at that revolution. An evolution of this present evolutionary dead-end won't cut it IMO. It needs something as new and disruptive as the first Oculus.
Ya know, I dont think the
tech barriers were really unforeseen. I think there were fairly realistic ideas about what needed to be done to achieve progress here. It's probably taking a bit longer than initially expected, but I think in the ten years since the Oculus DK2(which I consider the first properly thought through VR headset made by a company with any kind of real money), few of those earlier pioneers working at Oculus and Valve and whatnot would be totally shocked by today's hardware and any supposed lack of progress.
I expect some might have preferred to see a slightly different direction, like stripping out all the hardware required for standalone VR to focus on making the smallest and lightest headset possible. But at the same time, many also
did think standalone VR would be the future quite early on. And knew that making it affordable would be key, which would mean compromises.
Honestly, I dont think there's any sort of tech revolution that's going to change this. I think VR is fundamentally going to be limited by the opportunity cost of game developers having to decide whether to make a traditional game or a VR game, and the fact that the answer to this is pretty much a no-brainer in almost every situation, especially for any larger developer/publisher. This 'chicken or the egg' problem VR has had from the beginning seems to something quite insurmountable. Should somebody release a headset next year with 4k per eye, 150 degree FoV, the size and weight of some basic goggles and all for $200, this calculus still doesn't really change.
I think that aspect is probably what was most 'unforeseen' and what everybody got wrong in terms of their predictions of VR's potential. Just the completely basic financial reality of VR game development.
Now, AR could be a different story. I still think AR is gonna be a genuinely mainstream thing at some point in humanity's future, whether it be 20 years or 50 years or whatever.