These are very good questions and I absolutely agree with last paragraph but it's far too early to conclude we're in for a VR winter.

> There’s nothing fundamentally illogical about any of these ideas, but they do remind me a little of Karl Popper’s criticism of Marxists - that when asked why their supposedly scientific prediction hadn’t happened yet they would always say ‘ah, the historical circumstances aren’t right - you just have to wait a few more years’.

This is the necessary position when arguing for the inevitability of something that hasn't happened yet. That the arguments are structurally similar isn't evidence for or against. The arguments themselves are what need to be examined.

In the past 20 years, we went from human-narrated MapQuest print-outs from a computer at home to live directions on a tiny computer in our pocket narrated to us via a tiny computer in our ears. For a long time, I held out from upgrading to a smartphone. It was only when I was lost in a city in 2013 and had no idea how to get back home without calling someone many miles away that I finally caved. No one built the entire combination of smartphone, LTE, or voice assistants right away because they wanted a better MapQuest, the pieces came together organically.

> if ‘real VR’ needs something that’s ten or twenty years away, we’re in for another VR winter.

The modern smartphone was ten or twenty years away from the world wide web, which was ten or twenty years away from the computer. Each of these technologies found a niche, however small, until they took over the world.

Is it possible that enthusiasm for VR might wane and the market might die before it has a chance to grow? Absolutely, it's possible. However, the ideal form of the technology being a long way out doesn't make it inevitable.

Tech doesn't need a killer-app to gain a permanent foothold. It helps, but it seems that it's the exception rather than the norm. Incrementally expanding niches is a much more predictable way to bring a product to market.

To me, the big open question is whether or not the small niches VR has today can be grown enough to reach sustainability before the primary hardware vendors (Valve, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple) lose interest. That's a function of price. Given the strong overlap with the hot tech of today (phones, watches, headphones), price will be driven down regardless of how successful VR is. That lowers the threshold of how successful VR needs to be today.

> Meanwhile, it’s instructive that now that we’re all locked up at home, video calls have become a huge consumer phenomenon, but VR has been not. This should have been a VR moment, and it isn’t.

This isn't a very convincing argument. Devices that can do video conferencing are everywhere today. Zoom is free. Of course it's a phenomenon. Meanwhile, I can't buy a VR headset today without paying 50% above MSRP or waiting 8 weeks. Even then, I'm one of the lucky ones who hasn't lost their job yet and can thus entertain the idea of spending $$$ on entertainment.

I would want to see market data following more high profile releases like HL Alyx or whatever Apple has planned, and look out for a trend in hardware vendors pulling back from VR.