I find it utterly fascinating how VR and 3D keep coming back in cycles every couple of decades, but ultimately fail to stick.

3D film was big in the 1950's, but fell out of fashion as colour film processes became cheaper and more ubiquitous. The 3D technology of the day couldn't handle colour film, and colour was a bigger leap forward in immersion than 3D. The 3D surge that happened a couple decades ago was in full-colour, but still subsided. Home video was on the rise, and the expense of 3D in the home was probably to blame, as well as half-baked solutions. I owned a 3D capable projector for a while, but it had to be run at a reduced refresh rate and took a big brightness hit in 3D mode. I watched 3D movies only a couple of times, and stuck to good old 2D after that. I no longer own a 3D capable display.

There was a big content problem with 3D movies. Some movies attempted to WOW you with 3D gimmicks. Scott Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" was guilty of this. It was a mostly 2D documentary that occasionally rammed a robot arm in your face or had a collage of images popping out of the wall for no particular reason. The result was that you were more frequently distracted from the experience by 3D gimmicks than further immersed in it. Other films took the approach of making both 2D and 3D versions available, but this made 3D non-essential to the experience. 3D just didn't add much. I often found myself preferring the 2D version because so many cinemas have brightness problems with 3D projection.

VR was big in the 90's, mainly in VR Cafes. The technology was cool as hell in concept, but the reality was underwhelming. Computers of the day just weren't fast enough, and the results were literally nauseating. VR fell out of fashion, the cafes went out of business, and that was mostly it for VR until a few years ago. The current surge has much better hardware and far more compelling experiences. Valve's Alyx is just plain brilliant! Unfortunately, it's still nauseating for some and a truly civilized VR experience seems just beyond the capabilities of all but the most ridiculously expensive hardware at present. As a result, adoption is poor and the current wave of VR is petering out, like 3D did a decade or so ago. There aren't many VR headsets out there, so there isn't a lot of compelling software, so there isn't a lot of reason for more people to buy expensive headsets, and so on.

For my money, the problem is that VR and 3D aren't as big a leap forward as they need to be in order to justify by their current expense and downsides. People can use their imagination to immerse themselves through a 2D window really effectively. VR probably isn't going to catch on until it's cheap and trouble-free. Eventually, it'll be better/cheaper at delivering a big 2D window than a physical 2D screen can, but it's probably not going to succeed until then.