while to get to the place it needs to be,” says
CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, adding that
the wait will be “years, not months.” Even
Jaunt, despite the boost from McCartney
and more than $100 million of funding,
including from Disney, couldn’t make a go
of VR. Last year it shifted its attention to
a related technology, augmented reality,
which adds visual cues to real-life settings
rather than trying to immerse users in
distinct worlds. “We were focused on driv-
ing consumer adoption and understanding
what consumers want to watch in VR,” says
CEO Mitzi Reaugh, who oversaw a mass
layoff at the Silicon Valley company. “It just
wasn’t moving on the timeline that made
sense for our company.”
It is tempting to write off virtual reality
as yet another overhyped fad. Yet that
would ignore the technology industry’s
long history of fallen pioneers paving
funding to open virtual reality arcades in
cities from New York to Bangkok, shut-
tered all the locations after just two years.
Google’s in-house VR film studio, Spot-
light Stories, folded earlier this year. And
CCP Games, a popular Icelandic video
game developer, laid off 100 people and
closed its VR operation in 2017. “We saw
in our own data that this is gonna take a
VIRTUAL REALITY
1987
the year
VR pioneer
Jaron
L anier is
said to
have coined
the term
“virtual
realit y”
