This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster.
To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.
The folks coming from film/video to VR speak of it as a new medium. Describing it as analogous to the early days of cinema, before the now familiar cinematic idioms had been developed. The folks working on WebVR say similar things wrt web idioms. And, to a perhaps lesser extent, gamedevs do too (motion, controls, showing state, haptics, accessing inventory, etc). And almost none of these communities were active in past VR waves.
So perhaps you and the article are using the phrase "new medium" differently.
Yes, perhaps I could have been more clear here. As I mentioned in the post, while technology is certainly not new, it's more accessible, such that creators have access to it as a new medium.
This is just blatantly not true, at least not on the implied timescale. VR has been around for literally decades, including immersive VR with head and hand tracking. I know because I used it in 1998. The current VR hype cycle is based on this all having gotten a lot cheaper and faster.
To top it off, listing Snow Crash and Neuromancer as suggested reading is just silly. Those are the exact same books we were reading during the last VR boom, and while they're two of my favorites, they're both laughably wrong about VR. Specifically, VR is bad for the exact use cases presented in these novels! VR is, was, and will continue to be a product with niche appeal. We'll see the market expand because it's cheaper, but it's not an effective user interface for most applications.