Today, we are going to celebrate the end of VR with a big funeral event that is going to happen both in real life and VR. This will be the last act of that gimmick tech called virtual reality.
The VR Funeral
We have all read from tech magazines and LinkedIn posts that VR is dead and the metaverse is dead. It’s definitely over, like 3D TVs or the Spice Girls. We all VR enthusiasts are so sad about this, so we are going to say farewell to our beloved technology today, in a big event: the VR Funeral, or like we are already nicknaming it, the MRourning.
Born thanks to a collaboration between multiple VR institutions, companies (Pico, Meta, HTC, etc…), and VR events organizers (like AWE, VRAR World, XRCC, etc…), the VR Funeral will be the final event of virtual reality. After that, there will be no more events about immersive realities, and all companies will shut down the production of VR headsets. All VR runtimes will enter life support and will be discontinued in the upcoming weeks (please refer to the pages of the manufacturers to see the roadmaps of the various vendors).
The agenda
The MRourning will have as ITS special host Ori Inbar, the famous head of AWE. This is the expected agenda (times are in PST):
9:00 – 10:00: Ori Inbar will present his keynote “XR is NOT going mainstream”. He will also announce that AWE will be rebranded AIWE and will only be an event about AI
10:00 – 10:30: Neal Stephenson will say he would have preferred to invent the word “AI” instead of “metaverse”
10.30 – 11:00 Last Instagram Q&A with Andrew Bosworth. Boz will show everyone the dice that Meta executives threw every time they had to decide Meta Reality Labs’s strategy
11:00 – 11:45 Panel “How to kill VR with style”, featuring the guy that invented the Rift S (which died 4 months after its release), the guy who launched the Quest Pro (which died upon release), and the Decagear team (whose headset died even before releasing). Moderates the designer of the LG SteamVR headset
11:45 – 12:00 Some Nigerian guys on stage will tell who in the audience they have seen naked via the images reviewed on the Ray-Ban Meta. An award will be given to the most beautiful one
12:00 – 13:00 1 hour of loop replay of the spinning head with which the Vive Cosmos was announced
13:00 – 13:30 VIRGIN will read some of his most trolling comments on Road To VR
13:30 – 14:00 Damo9000 will present his last EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA newspaper
14:00 – 14:45 Panel “LinkedIn VR influencers”, featuring the guy who keeps saying that “LBVR is making a lot of money” and the other guy saying that “B2B VR is making a lot of money”. Moderates Bob Stone
14:45 – 15:00 The guys of the previous panel admit that, actually, they never earned money thanks to VR
15:00 – 15:30 The CEO of McDonald’s will announce the open job positions for all the interested VR professionals. The guys of the previous panel will be the first to apply
15:30 – 16:00 Sponsored session: Pimax will announce the Pimax SuperBig Q, a 32K-per-eye headset, working also as a microwave, a shower, and a water scooter. Release date in Q3 2026
16:00 – 16:15 A girl on stage will try to log in to Echo VR, while a guy will try to log in to AltspaceVR, crying in the process
16:15 – 17:00 Panel “It’s the content, no it’s the ergonomics, no it’s the price”, with a discussion about why VR never succeeded. The panel will be carried on by AI agents trained on the same sentences repeated for 10 years by the VR community on the topic
17:00 – 17:15 Ori Inbar will announce a new initiative: “The XR Hall Of Fail”, featuring all the people who contributed the most to the failure of XR
17:15 – 18:00 Dinesh and Anna Punni will do a last edition of the XRCC hackathon, with many young teams tasked to do the best VR application in 45 minutes. The judge will be Christian Steiner, and the best team will win a potato (at least they will be able to eat something, unlike most VR game developers)
18:00 – 18:30 The International Red Cross will discuss all the physical injuries caused by VR headsets over these years: foreheads bleeding because of the Quest Pro, broken necks because of the front weight of headsets, or people becoming blind because of Sex Like Real
18:30 – 19:00 Repurposing your headset: how you can re-use your VR headset now that VR is dead. Some uses are like a flower pot or a paperweight
19:00 – 20:00 Final mourning ceremony, where Palmer Luckey will bury the first DK1 headset. There will be a special appearance by Mark Zuckerberg, who will rebrand his company again, from Meta into IAI (Innovative Artificial Industries)
20:00 – onwards Final relief with alcohol and VR porn
How to participate
The event will be held in the Santa Clara Convention Center today, on the 1st of April, at 9 am PST. Admission price is $9999.99, which you can pay here. I know it sounds expensive, but you won’t have to participate in all the future VR events, so in the end, you are still going to save money in the long run.
The in-person event is a great way to attend the VR Funeral, because in the physical location, you can find all the same people who have attended all the VR events in the past 10 years and see them for the last time. Furthermore, all participants will receive as a gift a digital kit to convert their LinkedIn page from VR experts to AI experts.
In case you can’t move to the US, you can still be part of this event by following it at this YouTube link.
See you there
I’m already on the plane to be part of this final act of VR, and if you’re really a VR enthusiast, you should, too. Let’s all say together farewell to VR, the most gimmicky technology ever.
(Header image created with ChatGPT)
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