But by the time Mark Zuckerberg announced his goal to get “a billion people in virtual reality” at Oculus Connect in 2017, the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ had already been reached.įunding scaled back, start-up failures began to mount and the ‘This is the year for VR’ media headlines were soon replaced by ‘VR is Dead!’ pieces. The publicity which followed reignited an explosion of interest in the decades old technology, as the potential for mass consumer adoption finally appeared within reach. Start-ups popped up in the thousands, major global tech brands got in the game and billions in investment flowed into the new high-growth sector. Just a couple of years later, Facebook had snapped up the startup for a cool $2 billion. Its latest turn started in 2012 with the famous Oculus Kickstarter crowdfund campaign that raised a record (at the time) $2.5 million from 10,000 investors for its Rift launch device. Virtual reality (VR) is a perfect example of a technology that has been through the hype cycle ringer. The final ‘Plateau of Productivity’ stage is when widespread adoption, unburdened from hype, starts to take off and the long overdue promise is gradually realized. If the technology manages to pull out of the resulting ‘Trough of Disillusionment’, the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ is where some common sense finally returns to the conversation and people begin to explore and appreciate where the technology can be put to effective use, and in practical ways. The buzz inflates people’s hopes to such unrealistic heights, the only way to go is down (‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’). This then spills over into overhyping in the media, often fueled by investors, silly funding rounds and a heavy dose of wildly optimistic business leaders, analysts or outspoken industry influencers. The pattern generally starts off with lots of excitement as the breakthrough technology captures people’s imagination (‘Innovation Trigger’). The Gartner ‘Hype Cycle’ identifies the different stages of promising new technologies that burst onto the scene, but then struggle to live up to the impossibly high expectations. It happens so frequently that the smart people at Gartner have illustrated the core trends and patterns around the phenomenon. We’ve been so spoiled by the breakneck pace of innovation in recent decades that when cool new tech arrives and doesn’t change the world overnight, we are quick to write it off completely.
But here, Thiel captures the unique impatience of the digital age. Us humans are a demanding lot at the best of times. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” – Peter Thiel, What Happened to the Future? (2011)