Comment by opportune

I have not developed a VR/AR game, but I imagine there are several chicken-egg problems making this possible killer app hard to achieve. One is that VR/AR adoption (and usage) is not enough to justify large studios spending huge sums of money developing games that make extensive use of Vr/ar features, at best they’ll take a regular game and port it to VR. Another is that there aren’t very many workers who are experienced at developing VR/AR applications yet, and that the tooling isn’t mature enough (or standardized enough) for this to be easy. But without killer apps there won’t be enough VR/AR users to begin with.

Also the hardware is rapidly developing and creating super flashy applications requires high-specced SKUs that are only supported by a small number of devices in the wild.

Porting 2D desktop applications with a couple VR/AR gimmicks to VR is something that is well scoped and comparatively easy, it also is mostly re-usable because any “render a 2D UI in 3d” tech is going to work in most or all applications. So in terms of getting features and applications to encourage adoption, it has very high ROI.

Also, people probably aren’t just going to strap on a VR headset to look at vacation photos or YouTube videos if the only thing it offers is a super wide field of view and immersive audio. But they will for… other kinds of photos and videos that Apple can’t demo on stage