The Rocinante Essays

Episode 7 takes apart the Metaverse Industrial Complex: consultants, vendors, analysts, innovation labs, and executives all declaring the metaverse inevitable before anyone proved it was useful. The product was never VR. It was billable hours. The money didn’t come from ROI. It came from innovation carve-outs buried inside giant consulting agreements — budget fog with better branding. Vendors want...

Welcome back, friends, to another episode in our ongoing autopsy of Enterprise VR — a bold vision of the future that somehow resulted in headaches, nausea, and the Operations VP quietly asking if VR training is mandatory. This series is a behind-the-scenes account narrated by someone who spent years watching Enterprise VR die the slowest possible death, not from lack of vision, but from friction,...

Welcome to Episode 5 of the Why Enterprise VR Failed series.  In this episode we’re asking a tougher question: Did one of the most critical groups for Enterprise VR’s success actually contribute the most to its demise? The answer? Let’s just say there’s no happy ending — because HR and Legal were involved. So silence your Slack notifications, brace for impact, and click below to read  Episode 5: C...

Now we arrive at the fourth installment of our "Why Enterprise VR Failed" novella. And if you were hoping this would be the triumphant turning point—where VR gets its act together, management and employees are happy, and we all ride off into the immersive sunset like heroes of the Metaverse… yeah, no.  This is the part where we teleport you to the boss level of dysfunction: Enterprise IT...

Episode 3 of our series on "Why Enterprise VR Failed" pokes fun at the underbelly of VR software development tools to determine if software is the true villain of our story or was it wildly misaligned teams and a tech industry that promised a holodeck and delivered us Microsoft MESH?  From the Unity vs. Unreal holy war to bloated dev teams that needed more roles than a James Cameron movi...

Once upon a time—okay, five years ago—enterprise VR looked like the next corporate messiah. Training, collaboration, simulations… the future was here, and it had headsets. Unfortunately, so did the IT audit team. What started with tethered headset monstrosities that required a gaming PC the size of a dishwasher evolved into standalone devices like the Oculus Quest—cheaper, wireless, and just good...

Welcome to Episode 1 of Why Enterprise VR Failed , where we unpack the beautiful dumpster fire that was Enterprise Virtual Reality. For decades, tech bros, consultants, and wide-eyed futurists pitched VR as the cure for corporate dysfunction—training would be revolutionized, meetings would be tolerable, and Gary from accounting would suddenly become a combat medic via headset. Spoiler alert: most...

The Why Enterprise VR Failed series is a no-holds-barred deep dive into why Virtual Reality, once hailed as the messiah of corporate training and collaboration, tripped over its own headset and is now hiding in the broom closet. Host Daniel Eckert—recovering  technology consultant and Enterprise VR veteran—takes you on a snark-filled tour of broken promises, clunky goggles, and the Metaverse Indus...