Don’t get me wrong. I think this is absolutely the best consumer virtual reality headset ever made. It’s relatively lightweight, works great, and should usher in a widespread acknowledgement of VR as a viable media type. But the current device will be remembered as the Apple Newton of VR – the first break-through product, but unfortunately the first massive failure. Why? For the same reason 3D glasses just didn’t make it at home. It’s simply too big, too bulky, too limited and too ugly to appeal to more than hard-core geeks. Let’s face it. There are few things more ridiculous than someone jacked into an Oculus Rift, exploring their very own world. The outsized head gear makes you look like an alien playing pin the tail on the donkey. And when you’re deep into it, your head flops around like Shermy at a Peanuts dance party, hepped up on Special K. This is not attractive, people.

But it’s not just how utterly absurd you look when “rifting”. The device just isn’t transformational enough to replace how we currently navigate virtual worlds – primarily through game consoles and big-screen TVs. Every new technology needs to have a net innovation score of Plus Two. In other words, it needs to deliver true substantial improvement on what’s come before on at least two separate dimensions. Take a step back somewhere, and you need three super breakthroughs. Two new limitations mean you need four “Ohmygawd” features. And so on and so forth.

Think about the TiVo for a minute. It was a marginal success, even though it contained three critical breakthroughs – pause live TV, random access to everything you’ve recorded, and the ability to schedule and group recordings days, weeks and months in advance. That was so far above both traditional linear television and the VCRs we used to use to record shows. Even better, you could actually skip commercials! Make that four breakthroughs. Unfortunately it was (at least in the early days) horrifically hard to set up, and required a kludge (in most cases) for the TiVo to control your cable or satellite set top box. Net of 2. And the 30 second skip feature required a secret code to activate, which probably ended up giving it a 1.5

MP3 players went through the same growing pains. They crushed the Walkman by giving you random access to hundreds of hours of music, but unfortunately it was a pain to encode and load music on those early players. Plus they were bigger and more fragile than a portable cassette player. Digital music players didn’t truly win until Apple created iTunes (to make it easy to rip and load music), and combined a better interface, smaller form factor and longer battery life into the first iPod. Oculus VR certainly provides an amazingly transformational experience. But that’s about it. On the downside, the device is bulky and hard to wear for a long time, image quality is far lower than our TVs, and you look like a dork when you wear it. Heck, there’s even a ghetto version invented by Google, called (and made out of) cardboard that slaps onto your phone and works almost as well.

So the Oculus is doomed – just like that other former darling of wearable computers, Google Glass. Whining of Glassholes aside, this product didn’t deliver enough utility to overwhelm its well documented limitations. But the biggest problem from my perspective was the lack of innovation. All Google did was miniaturize one of the biggest technology failures of 2002 – the Xybernaut Poma, which coincidentally anchored a massive stock fraud. How disappointing. In the end, consumers will turn away from things that make them look goofy, including both the Oculus Rift and Google Glass. But there’s good news out there too, because both of these products – like the Apple Newton – have inspired a new group of developers who will solve these problems. And we’re beginning to see them in the wild.