Success Quote by Thomas Dolby

Dolby’s line lands like a confession from a guy who helped score the future, only to discover the future is mostly cables and compromises. He’s describing that early, almost childlike VR fantasy: slip on a helmet and teleport into another world. It’s a clean, cinematic promise. Then he undercuts it with the phrase “virtual reality cottage industry,” which is doing a lot of work. “Cottage industry” evokes tinkering, garage-built prototypes, messy improvisation - not the sleek, corporate inevitability that tech marketing loves to project. The dream is frictionless; the reality is artisanal.

The intent here isn’t to dunk on VR so much as to document the gap between expectation and infrastructure. Dolby, as a musician, knows how seductive a new interface can be: synthesizers once carried the same utopian charge, the idea that you could press a key and summon an entire universe. His phrasing mirrors that emotional arc - wonder first (“be somewhere else”), then the sobering recognition that the medium isn’t magic, it’s labor.

The subtext is about escapism, but also about the consumer’s hunger to skip the awkward middle phase of any technology. He admits he wanted the fantasy product, not the workshop. Contextually, this feels like the early-to-mid VR era when headsets existed, demos dazzled, and the culture was already writing checks the hardware couldn’t cash. Dolby’s realism isn’t cynical; it’s the seasoned perspective of someone who’s watched “the next big thing” arrive as a pile of parts before it becomes a world.