Phil Lelyveld posted this on FB and while I agree with you on most of this (especially “When an industry is nascent, it’s hard to dream big. But that doesn’t mean time and resources shouldn’t be dedicated to doing it anyway.”), I think it’s lacking in one small area. You say “VR teams would do well to put aside time each week to engage in divergent thinking on truly revolutionary applications of VR, in order to avoid this mistake. (We do it in our office).”

I’m afraid that talking just among an existing team will still incur a lot of tunnel vision (speaking from experience), as startups by nature need to have everyone laser focused on their particular brand of koolaid. Also, we too often fall into group think around the loudest voice in the room making it hard for that team to have really open and effective discussions.

So, I am going to find a suitable spot where I can invite 10–12 people with varying degrees of knowledge of VR and from a cross-section of companies and industries, so have dinner and wine and discuss the first question “What do *you* want VR to be?”. If it goes well, I’ll recruit some people to duplicate the idea!

*We* need to define and guide the nature of the VR industry before the modern equivalents of RealVideo, Netscape and AltaVista get their way and force things into what is best for their products.