The funny thing about 3D printers is that they're making a bit of a comeback. The early ones managed to get the capabilities right - you can print some really impressive things on the older Creality printers, but it required fiddling, several hours of building the bloody things, cogged extruders, manual bed leveling and all sorts of technical hurdles. A very motivated techy person will persevere and solve them, and will be rewarded with a very useful machine. The other 99.99% of people won't and will either drop it the moment there's an issue or will hear from others that they require a lot of fiddling and never buy one. If things ever get more complicated than "I see it on a website and I click a few buttons" (incl maintenance) then it's too complicated to gain mass adoption... which is exactly what newer 3D printers are doing - the Bambulabs A1 Mini is £170, prints like a champ, is fairly quiet, requires next to no setup, takes up way less space than the old Enders and needs almost no maintenance. It's almost grandma-proof. Oh, and to further entice your grandma to print, it comes with all sorts of useful knick-knacks that you can start printing immediately after setup. On the hype cycle curve I think 3D printers are almost out of their slump now that we have models that have ironed out the kinks.
But for VR I think we're still closer to the bottom of the curve - Meta and Valve need something to really sell the technology. The gamble for Valve was that it'd be Half Life: Alyx, and for Meta it was portable VR but the former is too techy to set up (and Half Life is already a nerdy IP) while Meta just doesn't have anything that can convince the average person to get a headset (despite me thinking it's a good value just as a Beat Saber machine). But they're getting there - I've convinced a few friends to get a Quest 3S just to practice piano with Virtuoso and I think it's those kinds of apps I hope we see more of that will bring VR out of the slump.
And then LLMs I think their hype cycle is a lot more elevated since even regular people use them extensively now. There will probably be a crash in terms of experimentation with them but I don't see people stopping their usage and I do see them becoming a lot more useful in the long term - how and when is difficult to predict at the top of the hype curve.
Like I said, 3D printers have gotten incrementally better. Buddy of mine makes high-quality prints on one that’s way cheaper than what I owned back in the day.
And yet nothing has really changed because he’s still using it to print dumb tchotchkes like every other hobbyist 10 years ago.
I can foresee them getting better but never getting good enough to where they actually fundamentally change society or live up to past promises
But for VR I think we're still closer to the bottom of the curve - Meta and Valve need something to really sell the technology. The gamble for Valve was that it'd be Half Life: Alyx, and for Meta it was portable VR but the former is too techy to set up (and Half Life is already a nerdy IP) while Meta just doesn't have anything that can convince the average person to get a headset (despite me thinking it's a good value just as a Beat Saber machine). But they're getting there - I've convinced a few friends to get a Quest 3S just to practice piano with Virtuoso and I think it's those kinds of apps I hope we see more of that will bring VR out of the slump.
And then LLMs I think their hype cycle is a lot more elevated since even regular people use them extensively now. There will probably be a crash in terms of experimentation with them but I don't see people stopping their usage and I do see them becoming a lot more useful in the long term - how and when is difficult to predict at the top of the hype curve.