The Rocinante Essays

Why Enterprise VR Failed - Episode 4: The IT Problem or How the Middle Finger Can Be Used as a Pointing Device.

• Daniel Eckert • Season 1 • Episode 4

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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.

Welcome to Why Enterprise VR Failed, a seven-part audio essay produced by Rocinante Research, copyright 2025.


This is Episode 4: "The IT Problem, or How the Middle Finger Can Be Used as a Pointing Device."

These audio casts accompany the written series published on Linkedin and Medium, but are not a word-for-word reading. They are for those who’d rather hear bedtime stories from a slightly drunk chatbot than choke down another 4,000-word white paper from a person who won't put “visionary” in their LinkedIn bio. 

If headset-induced corporate drama is your guilty pleasure, then welcome to this audio cast — we’re continuing to unpack how Enterprise VR backflipped down the innovation funnel, missed the landing, and convinced the CFO that “patch management” was a wellness program.

But, before we get started, I need to introduce some additional voices you'll hear throughout this audio cast. 

There's the Narrator's voice (that’s me), the slightly caffeinated guide that escorts you through this minefield of bad decisions, questionable budget approvals, and headset-induced motion sickness. My job? keep the chaos moving and the sarcasm on-brand.

I'm the author's voice so think of me as your tour guide through this museum of failed enterprise VR experiments. Every exhibit is one I personally witnessed… or was playing "Baron Von Be Careful" and held the fire extinguisher when the project manager set everything on fire.

The Client, that's me, I’ll be the voice of the project managers, executives, and other hapless mortals who got trapped in this Metaverse collaboration space and couldn’t find the exit.

And finally, this is the Vendor voice and my role? Nod, smile, agree with everything, and—when the wheels come off—blame the consultants, the market, or “unexpected headwinds.” Of course, I'll never disparage the product.

Let's recap what has happened so far.

Once upon a PowerPoint deck—OK, five years ago—Enterprise VR was the next big thing. Consultants were foaming at the mouth. L&D departments were calling it “game changing.” Marketing was already picturing slow-motion montages of avatars high-fiving in a virtual space. The hype was so blinding, you needed to put on a VR headset to remind yourself it was just hype.

But flash forward to 2025, and where is Enterprise VR now? Mostly collecting dust next to the 3D printer and a sad stack of unopened Google Daydream View VR headsets.

In previous episodes, we confirmed that Enterprise VR actually had value (shocking, we know), exposed how hardware manufacturers “went enterprise” by slapping a new sticker on the same consumer headset and doubling the price, and peeled back the curtain on VR software development—a black hole of missing tools, shifting objectives, non-existent skillsets, and bloated project teams that operated on the sacred principle of “fake it till you make it.”

Now we arrive at the fourth installment of our 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.

… um. No.This is the part where we teleport you to the boss level of dysfunction: "Enterprise IT."

This episode belly flops us into lukewarm bathwater and explains why VR adoption often died not in the boardroom, but in the server room.

Just like the previous episodes there will be limited commercial breaks. But, I must warn you that this episode contains scenes of brutal honesty about corporate dysfunction, and IT-induced trauma. It may trigger flashbacks for those who’ve ever attempted to deploy a headset behind a firewall or asked, “Can we get this on the network by the end of the week?”

There are 4 scenes:

Scene 1: Who and what is enterprise IT: A macro-level look at the people who keep the digital lights on while being blamed for every innovation delay since the dawn of email. This is your decoder ring for understanding why VR makes them visibly twitch—and why draining the color of optimism from your face is often their most romantic love language.

Scene 2: Welcome to the department of NO! IT isn’t saying no to be mean. They’re saying no because they’ve seen things. Terrible things. Just remember, the first ten meetings are just different ways of telling you to go away.

Scene 3: What’s I T's beef with VR anyway? Their grievances aren’t petty—they’re deeply earned. This scene unpacks the chaos VR brings to security, device management, networking, and compliance.

And finally, Scene 4: This is my middle finger: It is the moment where I T, backed into a corner by bad documentation, unreasonable expectations, and a pilot program built in a weekend hackathon, has only one thing left to deploy: a glorious, unapologetic middle finger to the whole damn process.

Scene 1: Who and what is enterprise IT?

Before you blame them, hate them, create voodoo dolls and burn them, it’s important to understand them.

Enterprise Information Technology, or just IT, is like a cranky but well-meaning wizard who’s been guarding the castle for decades—armed with firewall scrolls, compliance incantations, and a deep, personal hatred for anything labeled “emerging tech.”

They’re not here for your shiny toys. They’re here to make sure the Karen from Marketing doesn’t accidentally open a phishing email that takes down the global supply chain.

Every new technology gets held up at the Innovation Drawbridge while IT asks, “Does it support SSO and encryption? Have you performed the mandatory blood sacrifice?”

IT is a mythical beast made of three parts paranoia, two parts caffeine, and one part obscure Cisco certification no one else understands. It’s the team of humans (mostly) who keep your company’s digital chaos barely under control. They’re the ones who reset your password for the fifth time this week, patch your operating system at 3 a.m., design, build, and support both custom and off-the-shelf applications, and quietly judge your 63 open Chrome tabs.

Inside the department, it’s a sacred mix of arcane legacy systems duct-taped to cloud dashboards, running on servers labeled “DO NOT TOUCH” in Comic Sans. If you suggest adding a new platform or device, be prepared for 3 months of weekly meetings to go over their 72-slide deck summarizing the request process, their three different risk assessments, and a mandatory lecture on “Shadow IT.”

They don’t move fast. They don’t break things and they barely tolerate Slack. But they’re the only reason your entire company doesn’t get ransomwared into oblivion by a teenager in Minsk.

It's best to remember that Enterprise IT isn’t one person. It’s a tribe, and this tribe has 8 different roles that VR project managers had to "engage" to achieve their goals.

Enemy #1 to Enterprise VR is "The Church Lady," the person assigned from Network Security who breathes through her eyelids. She reads NIST guidelines for fun and has “No” on a hotkey. "The Church Lady" can spot a phishing email from orbit and once made a grown product manager cry by asking how data was encrypted in transit and at rest. She dreams of audit logs and quietly manages three firewalls at home.

The 2nd most important persona in our tribe - The Infrastructure Guy, whose name is probably Bob, hasn’t smiled since Exchange 2003 and sits in a windowless cave with a direct line of sight to the server racks. Bob thinks the cloud is just someone else’s hard drive and has been one year away from retirement for the last 12-years.

Then there's "The Network man" who speaks only in Vee lands, port numbers, and has a laminated diagram of the network topology that no one else understands but everyone fears. If your headset can’t connect, it's because they’ve already blocked your MAC address for all eternity and routed all of your network requests to the Help Desk Slack channel.

You will most always run into The Enterprise Architect as they sit in on most meetings and rarely say much because they are dreaming of elegant systems from their Ivory Tower but are now stuck mediating passive-aggressive Slack wars between frontend and backend development teams. The EA uses UML diagrams as emotional armor and keeps a “tech debt” jar on their desk for every shortcut a Product Manager insists is “MVP.”

During planning phase, you'll meet the Cloud Architect who is really just a former sysadmin turned demigod of AWS. What they thought was a cool title is really nothing more than a role where they are in a state of constant financial dread while decoding EC2 billing charges. The cloud architect worships infrastructure-as-code, speaks fluent Terraform, and has strong opinions on serverless that no one asked for.

There will eventually be a representative from the Help Desk Team. They are the overworked tech therapists with dark circles under their eyes that smell like chocolate and barbecue. They know your password is out of compliance, they know that you death scroll all night on hinge, and they know your laptop’s entire browsing history since you started, 4-years ago. No matter the problem, they always tell you to reboot your machine, even if you are calling about your corporate badge not working.

Finally, there is that person from DevOps, who will angrily remind you they are not in IT. All the while managing the entire Continuous Delivery pipeline, automating deployments, and writing scripts that somehow control half the org’s infrastructure.

In short, IT is the only thing standing between your company and total digital meltdown—and they’d appreciate it if you stopped asking if the Wi-Fi is down while they’re rebooting the firewall.

Scene 2: The Department of, No!

In the beginning, there was the VR headset—and it was good. Then Enterprise IT found out about it. And like a smoke detector in a fireworks factory, the security alarms went off before you even finished asking if you can get the SSID password to the corporate Wi-Fi network.

Enterprise IT isn’t trying to crush your dreams. They’re just stuck playing defense for a company that will absolutely blame them the moment something catches fire. Because in most org charts, IT isn’t seen as an innovator. It’s a cost center—a line item that only makes headlines when something breaks. They’re the guardians of uptime, the keepers of compliance, and the sworn enemies of things they didn’t approve themselves.

And when something does break? It costs real money. If the online store goes down, money stops coming in the door. If payroll crashes, people don’t get paid—and the government starts circling. If email, Teams, or Slack goes dark, the entire company grinds to a halt. And if a public company gets hacked? Say hello to headlines, lawsuits, and some very fun time with the SEC.

Now add the fact that IT is responsible for every software license and tool the company touches. Imagine trying to explain to Legal why you approved software that technically allows Meta to drop into your "secure" Horizon Workroom meetings uninvited. Or telling the CFO you signed off on an MDM platform that charges ten times more per user for a VR headset than that same platform charges for a mobile phone.

If something goes wrong, and they can’t pin it on a consultant or third-party vendor? Someone’s badge stops working Monday morning.

So no, IT is not thrilled about your “pilot program.” They’re just trying to keep the company from being the next cybersecurity cautionary tale—and maybe keep their jobs in the process.

Here's a direct quote from the Global Head of Infrastructure at a Fortune 100 company:

“If it doesn’t pass a security audit, it’s not coming within 50 feet of my network. I don’t care if it sings lullabies and cures freakin' cancer!”

Scene 3: What is I T’s beef with VR anyway?

Look, I T doesn’t hate VR. They just… have questions. The kind of questions like: ‘Why is it necessary to put this thing on my network? What data is it sending to a server in another hemisphere? Why does it scan the entire floor for bluetooth devices when you boot it up? Why is it necessary to have those cameras on while in a secure space? And why does it keep pinging the financial platform?

See, IT’s job is to keep the company from accidentally starring in the next ransomware documentary. So when you show up with a headset that talks more to the outside world than it does to the person wearing it… yeah, you’re gonna get blocked.

There are many reasons IT gives VR the "corporate squinty eye". In this audio cast we'll discuss 10 different ones. But don't forget, there are many others that are discussed in "Episode 2: Strapped-in and Let Down: How Enterprise VR Got Duped by Consumer Tech."

The best place to start is with Device Management & Control

Since about 2010, if you brought a personal iPhone or Android phone to work and wanted access to the corporate WiFi or your work email account, I T just texted you a link, you tapped it, and — congratulations, your phone is now a ‘Managed Device.’ Translation: I T just moved in as your new roommate, and they brought their own set of keys. They can wipe your phone, lock you out, or silently install apps — all without your approval. At least they give you that $20 a month stipend (that you get taxed on as income). 

Most VR headsets (especially consumer-first models like the Meta Quest) lack any Device Management capabilities. Which, if you remember from episode 2, is kinda odd as most wireless VR headsets are built on a variation of android. So it's logical for one to expect MDM to work on the Meta Quest just like it does on your Pixel Pro. 

Sadly, MDM doesn’t work on consumer wireless VR headsets. If you want I T to manage them, you first have to buy the pricier enterprise headset model — and then license a different, more expensive version of your MDM software. With VR, it’s pay extra for the “enterprise” sticker, then pay extra for the privilege of securely managing it. When you add it all up, each enterprise VR headset tends to cost more than the CEO’s Slayer Espresso machine. 

That's only the beginning of I T's frustration with VR headsets.

2nd on our list - Authentication and Identity Management

The ancient and mystical art of proving you are who you say you are—without relying on your first pet’s name or your Facebook login. It’s the system that connects your corporate badge, your login credentials, and your identity to the network.

If you are using a consumer headset, lack of native integration with SSO, Active Directory, or MFA makes it impossible to enforce corporate identity policies as many headsets rely on consumer-grade login systems such as Google, Meta, iCloud, or Microsoft.

Enterprise VR deployments are rarely for individual use (especially if they are used for training employees). Headsets are shared, and many enterprise headsets do not support multiple user logins on the same headset. This is called a "many-to-one model" (many employees, sharing one headset).

Meta, always one to rebrand when a product isn't working verses just fixing the problem, began with Oculus for Business, which then became Quest for Business, that became Meta for Business and is now known as "Meta Horizon Managed Services". Anyway, the latest version does support a shared headset mode, and no longer requires a corporate user to use their personal Meta login to log in to a enterprise quest. 

Yes, until recently, you were required to use your personal Meta login to access an enterprise headset. Today, you can use your work email address, as long as your enterprise uses managed Meta accounts. 

But guess what? All that information you needed to sign in to that headset is stored on Meta servers – and not in your enterprise cloud. I guarantee, The Church Lady from IT Security won’t sign off on this unless your company just doesn’t care anymore about user privacy.

The lack of robust Identity Management leads to insecure workarounds, such as shared logins or personal accounts masquerading as corporate identity anchors.

Point number three - Data Privacy, Retention, Telemetry, and Government Privacy Laws

In theory, data privacy is about protecting employee and corporate information from misuse, abuse, or accidental appearances of your data in your competitor’s hands. Telemetry, on the other hand, is the endless stream of “harmless” data VR headsets send back to the manufacturer's home office —like usage stats, room scans, controller movement, eye tracking, and possibly what Karen had for lunch based on how often she burps into the microphone.

Enterprises live and die by regulatory compliance. socks, hippa, GDPR, PCI—pick your acronym. VR devices often lack the audit logs, access controls, and retention policies needed to meet even the minimum bar when it comes to data privacy.

The headset knows where you are, what you’re doing, how you’re moving, and for how long—with logs, timestamps, and sometimes even video. This data often gets sent back to the manufacturer or sometimes to off-the-shelf software you didn’t even know was listening. Ask why, and they’ll mutter something about “anonymizing the data.” Sure. And I’ve got a lovely timeshare in Florida to sell you too.

This data is often stored on servers your company doesn’t own, in countries you can’t pronounce, governed by privacy policies you probably didn’t read.

If you’re in healthcare, finance, or any regulated industry, congratulations—you’re now in violation of about 12 different acronyms. Under GDPR, improper data handling can cost you up to €20 million or 4% of global revenue (whichever ruins your year more). Under CCPA, fines run up to $7,500 per violation—which adds up fast when every headset becomes its own little privacy lawsuit generator. For those not familiar with CCPA - California Consumer Privacy Act—aka the “Don’t Sell My Data, Bro” law. Basically, If you’re collecting data on users—especially in creepy amounts, like many VR systems do—you better have a plan to disclose, secure, and delete it on request. Otherwise, it’s fine time.

If your vendor’s privacy policy includes phrases like “for product improvement,” it probably means “we’re harvesting your usage data.”

Point number four - Network Security & Segmentation

In normal I T land, network segmentation is how you prevent a rogue printer in Sales from talking to your payroll system in Finance. It’s basic digital hygiene—like not sharing your toothbrush with strangers. In VR land? It’s a headset connecting over unsecured Wi-Fi, broadcasting its presence like a Bluetooth-enabled megaphone, asking, “Hey, anybody got an open port – I’m trying to phone home to my maker.”

Most VR headsets default to whatever Wi-Fi they can find—guest networks, Starbucks, or that one open SSID from 2014.

Until recently, VR headsets lacked V-Lan support or enterprise Wi-Fi authentication, so placing them on segmented or isolated networks often means jumping through hoops while blindfolded. 

As an example, a Fortune 500 VR Leader shared, I had spent more than 6 months working with IT to design and fund the creation of a hidden guest-Wi-Fi network that could be accessed by 300 Enterprise VR headsets I was responsible for deploying and managing.

This leader had more than 20 years of network experience and was highly respected - and the BEST he could get was for I T to create a new network - not even running on the same equipment as the corporate network – it was a physically separate network. The network existed outside of the corporate firewall, but it was managed by I T. 

“It was about 3000 man-hours of work – most of it was meetings, and of course, we had to purchase all the network equipment and pay for a separate line in each of the 20 locations. Overall, getting the headsets on a network cost much more than the 300 enterprise headsets we purchased.”

Issue number five - Update & Patch Management

In a well-behaved enterprise system, IT controls when updates happen. They test these updates and patches first, roll them out in waves, and have rollback plans in place. It’s the grown-up version of “measure twice, cut once.”

In VR? It’s more like “surprise!”—because headset firmware updates often show up unannounced, drop mid-session, and occasionally bring along delightful “improvements” like broken apps, missing buttons, or a redesigned interface nobody asked for.

Firmware and OS updates are often manual or unpredictable and may include UI/UX changes that disrupt training workflows.

The large Enterprise VR management tools let you delay updates for 30 days, but after that – all bets are off. You have only 30 days to fix whatever app it has broken. If Meta determines it’s a “critical fix”, they can push right past any blockers to force update a headset. 

So yes, you are finally coming to the realization you are just “borrowing” these headsets from the manufacturer, and they let you license them for a hefty fee.

Worst of all: No rollback path. If an update breaks your enterprise app, congrats—you’re now debugging in real-time with a room full of angry executives as these tools rarely let you rollback a firmware update.

Issue number six - Hygiene

In the enterprise world, we share conference rooms, coffee machines, and occasionally—VR headsets. And unlike a mouse or keyboard, these things go on your face. As in, full contact. Skin-to-foam. Brow-to-sponge. It’s like kissing your boss without actually kissing your boss.

Shared headsets are basically mobile petri dishes. Sweat, makeup, dead skin cells, and bacteria love foam facial interfaces more than your sales team loves buzzwords.

VR headsets may look sleek and futuristic, but after five back-to-back users in a training lab, they smell like a high school football locker room. If you don’t build in proper hygiene practices, you’re not just risking a gross-out—you’re risking HR complaints and legal exposure. Clean it, cover it, or kiss your headset budget goodbye.

Somehow, I T, is responsible for cleaning protocols, sanitizing schedules, and stocking replaceable face covers, because apparently the solution to workplace hygiene is now been bestowed on those server herders because L&D can't be bothered with "administrative functions.”

Issue number seven - Physical Security & Asset Tracking

In the laptop and managed phones world, devices are tagged, logged, assigned, and—when things go well—returned.

But, in the VR world? At best you can see if a specific headset is on the network, or at least when it was last on the network. If you can see it, you can wipe it. But if they are consumer headsets? Let’s just say it would be easier to find your missing padlock from middle school then to locate a missing consumer headset. The good news, half your headsets have already “gone missing”, and the other half are charging in a janitor’s closet behind the mop bucket.

Headsets are portable, expensive, easily stolen, misplaced, and even harder to track. Most don’t include GPS recovery features. Even with asset tagging, and secure storage policies, they’re a prime target for “accidental repurposing.”

I T is worried about Karen from HR taking a headset home, and leaving it logged into your corporate network while her teenager downloads some ‘free’ mod pack from VR Smash. The next thing you know, your compliance training course is now trending in Kazakhstan.

I T’s paranoia isn’t random. They’ve seen it before: phones synced to personal clouds, laptops left on trains, files forwarded to Gmail. A rogue VR headset? That’s just season three of the same horror anthology.

Issue number eight - Storage, Charging, and Environment Conditions

While most execs imagine VR headsets as magical portals to productivity, IT knows they’re more like needy toddlers: expensive, fragile, and prone to overheating if left unattended. Where and how you store and charge them isn’t just logistics—it’s risk management. Enterprise VR doesn’t live in a desk drawer. It needs proper charging racks, clean air, padded cases, and space to operate. It’s not a stapler—it’s a fragile, heat-sensitive surveillance device with a lithium-ion core.

Climate control is not optional. VR headsets don’t like heat, humidity, or dust—and they really don’t like being tossed on a shelf next to the office space heater. Improper storage can lead to battery swelling, display damage, or kernel panics.

Charging stations need planning. These aren’t plug-and-play devices. Charging five headsets in a row off a surge protector behind the copy machine is how you end up with an unscheduled fire drill.

VR training spaces are physical spaces. Unlike laptops, headsets usage demand movement and space. That means trip hazards, flailing arms, broken monitors, and one unlucky employee who found the edge of the conference table with their kneecap. All of those situations need to addressed before someone puts a headset on, or you will be responding to employee disability paperwork until you retire. 

Then there’s passthrough scanning — the feature that’s supposed to keep you from face-planting into a desk or filing cabinet. Sounds harmless, right? Except passthrough is just a fancy way of saying: cameras mapping your entire space. Many headsets don’t just trace your walls — they capture full spatial maps and sometimes even video during setup.

So if you’re training inside an R&D lab, a legal war room, or in front of Chad’s sacred whiteboard of “totally genius revenue hacks,” congrats: you may have just uploaded your business plan, floor plan, and secrets to the cloud.

And yes, somehow I T is now responsible for the storage, charging, and the environment you will be using your headsets.

Finally, issue number nine and ten - Lifecycle Planning & Vendor Lock-In

In the enterprise world, IT plans hardware refreshes years in advance. Laptops last 4–5 years. Phones? Maybe 3. VR headsets? You’ll be lucky to get 24 months before the next model drops, breaks compatibility, and silently dares you to start over.

VR headsets age like avocados—perfect one day, useless the next. Battery degradation, lens damage, feature creep… you name it.

Vendor lock-in is real and backward compatibility is a myth. Meta, HTC, and others build walled gardens tighter than your company’s travel policy. If you need to switch headset platforms? That’ll be a total rebuild, relicensing, and a probably a complete rewrite of many of your internal applications.

To make matters worse, the vendors rarely share their roadmaps. If you are lucky, you might get a sneak peak of "where they are going," but chances are what they are showing you is more a wish list of what they think you need than an actual strategic roadmap.

Scene 4: Conclusion

Consumer VR devices were built for couches, not cubicles. They expect wide-open networks, zero firewalls, no proxies, and an internet connection untouched by policy or paranoia.

Many VR deployments died the same tragic death: The headset couldn’t reach essential services unless it was dropped onto the unsecured guest Wi-Fi—right next to the breakroom’s PS5.

But it gets worse. These headsets didn’t support encryption at rest, federated identity, secure data wipe, or even basic role separation. Every security audit ended the same way, they always failed. And even when IT duct-taped third-party tools on to compensate or the business ponied up the “Enterprise Version”, guess who still held the liability? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t the Vendor, the consultant, or the business. OK, here's the second hint, "It rhymes with I T."

Let’s talk about that meeting—you know the one. The Business, vendor, and IT finally sit down to hash out the rollout plan. I T reviews the plan and the documentation, slowly lowers their coffee, and says:

“So let me get this straight. No encryption, no SSO, no patch management, no RBAC… and you want to put this on the corporate network?” They literally laugh out loud. "That will be a hard, NO!" 

Cue the vendor’s “solution”: “Just put the headsets on guest Wi-Fi and don’t connect them to anything.”

That’s right. The workaround was to neuter the device until it was useless… but technically it could access a network – just not the network you needed access to.

Some teams got it to work—by isolating devices, limiting scope, or working with niche vendors who knew how to play nice with IT. But most? They gave up. Or paused the program. Or moved it to “Innovation”— corporate speak for “The Island of Misfit Toys.”

The headset didn’t fail because the idea was bad. It failed because IT didn’t have the tools—or the trust—to manage it safely.

Enterprise VR wasn’t killed by IT… It was "blocked" by IT. And for good reason.

First, these so-called ‘enterprise-ready’ headsets? They shipped without a roadmap—none—so companies were left guessing how to prepare for the future. Like, are we rolling this out to a hundred employees? A thousand? Are we replacing it in two years? Who knows?

Then, there’s the Wi-Fi. Built for a dorm room, not a conference room. Great if you’re streaming cat videos in your pajamas—not so great if you’re trying to run a global product design meeting.

And don’t even get me started on the ‘management tools.’ An afterthought, slapped together like Amazon desk furniture that came without instructions, instead of being part of an actual strategy.

Finally, the security audits. Let’s just say they lit up DEFCON alerts like the Las Vegas strip on New Year’s Eve.

So yeah… VR was blocked by IT. And honestly? They weren’t wrong so it's completely understandable why they just resorted to saying, no. 

Because at the end of the day, if a device can’t prove it’s secure, scalable, supportable, and compliant…the only thing getting deployed is the middle finger.

We’ve identified Hardware, Software, and IT, as contributing factors to the failure of Enterprise VR. But these pale in comparison to what is next. In “Episode 5: Corporate Learning and Development: Where good ideas and dreams go to die” we will ask, if one of the most critical groups to the success of Enterprise VR was really the group that contributed the most to its downfall.

About the Author

Daniel Eckert officially escaped the consulting trenches in late 2023 after 29-years of corporate gladiator combat, including 8-years spent wrangling Enterprise VR projects into something vaguely functional. His role often involved stopping large companies from launching half-baked metaverse experiments with all the strategic foresight of a potato gun.

He also co-authored the now-collectible academic artifact "The Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Soft Skills Training in the Enterprise" — a paper cited roughly half as often as that one Gartner slide every VR startup crams into their Series A deck.

Daniel now masquerades as a Principal at Rocinante Research. (Yes, that’s a Don Quixote reference and yes, it’s also a nod to the most amazing sci-fi television show, "The Expanse".

Check out some of his other snark-laced rants and war stories on Medium.

If you liked this audio cast, slap that like button or subscribe like you are Davie504 after a sixpack of Redbull. Got thoughts? Fling them into the comments like you are “cooking a grenade” in Call of Duty — we welcome applause, rage-fueled manifestos, unsolicited Metaverse stock tips, and your increasingly convincing argument that the only reason IT blocks passthrough mode is because it exposes the real matrix.

If you hated it, just unplug your headset mid-demo and shout “The metaverse died for our bandwidth sins!” as you fall backward into a conference room chair. 

Because it could always be worse—like realizing you paid 15 hundred dollars for a Quest Pro so you could poorly annotate PDFs in mid-air like a budget Tony Stark.