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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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"Never happen" is quite an ignorant prediction to make when it's already been happening since the 90s. Sounds just like another one of the people that think everyone has to adopt something for it to be viable.
I actually know several people IRL who have VR headsets, so it's not super uncommon. It doesn't have to be "for everyone" to succeed - look at the hang glider market for example. How many people are flying around on hang gliders these days? It's still going on, and there's millions of dollars in the hang glider market. I only know one guy who used to fly around on one but I don't know if he still does.
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/my-prodigal-brainchild
Read his post. This article is lazy, he at no point says it will "never happen". What he does do is argue that there's not much of a business case, they aren't really doing anything with it that's new and good enough to warrant that, which makes it unlikely to ever be a major success. He also concedes that after the $80 million dollar failure of the metaverse his opinion might be worth ignoring. So, he isn't really drawing a hardline on any of these opinions either.
Billion, not million.
Right, good call, those zeroes probably matter to someone at Meta
The fact those zeroes didn't matter enough is the interesting part. I'd be happy with either 80 million or billion, the fact they kind of shrugged off this experiment is both mind blowing and completely unsurprising at the same time.
Even meeting him where he is i.e. headsets replacing pocket computers, "never" is a long time. I am no sort of expert but I don't think there's any technical reason we couldn't achieve some kind of headgear that's a suitable replacement for a smartphone. After that, it's only a matter of time before everyone living is used to them being around, at which point I think they'd be just as easily accepted as cars or skyscrapers, for better or worse. My money's on it happening eventually.
Yeah, there's lots of takes on technology that are outlandish, but something like VR/AR HMDs becoming so unobtrusive that they become common seems perfectly viable. Not yet, but I could easily see it being capable of happening in the next century at most, if not far sooner. We aren't there yet, but it doesn't seem far off. The issue with current HMDs is mostly just that they're too heavy to be comfortable, which is a solvable hardware issue.
80s