I recently had the amazing opportunity to be the assistant director for a short 360˚ film titled Knot For Sale through the Writing 420 filmmaking class at the University of Victoria. A 360˚ film is made with a series of cameras that capture all angles around a single point, and is then viewed using a virtual reality headset.

A question the class was posed on the first day was whether virtual reality is a “a gimmick or game-changer.” Go search those terms and you’ll find dozens of articles asking the exact same question. That phrase pops up perennially whenever some new tech bursts onto the scene. Remember when 3D TVs and curved screens were going to become the fixture of every home? And then they weren’t. Google Glass has mostly met a similar, whimpering fate. The jury still seems out on the Apple Watch: despite massive consumer and expert criticism it’s believed to have generated $10 billion for Apple by July 2016. We’ll see whether or not those sales stay up, but given how dissatisfied many purchasers have been, my guess is that it won’t. One I expected to die a quick and forgettable death was the iPad—after all, who needs a Frankensteined smartphone/laptop that can’t make calls? Needless to say, I’ve been chewing my hat for that one for a while now.

In each of these cases, accessibility was a significant factors to success. Accessibility has a lot to do with affordability, but also “side effects” and the level of support these technologies receive. Many 3D TV users have experienced motion sickness, headaches, and even seizures from the sets. Most of these “game-changers” have been cost prohibitive. A lack of developer or network support were the respective death knells for the Google glass and 3D television. Broadcasters like the BBC and Sky have stopped producing 3D content, and other 3D channels have gone defunct.

Virtual reality is going to face a lot of similar growing pains. A great deal of the dialogue has focussed on gaming applications, but 360˚ video will face a lot of the same questions. Accessibility is seeming less and less an issue. Going out and buying an Oculus or HTC Vive (which are more geared towards gaming) will still set someone back a few hundred dollars, but “cardboard” sets have opened us VR substantially. Google Cardboard and other unofficial sets designed to use a smartphone to view 360˚ film cost about $15 to $30 (US). YouTube’s adoption of 360˚ video opened up this platform to millions of users, and parent company Google has tried to ensure that many 360˚ cameras would be supported for easy uploading. More and more production companies are creating 360˚ video content, ranging documentaries, interviews, comedy sketches and narrative films.

Of course, 360˚ film still relies on smartphones, which themselves are pretty expensive. Another black mark against VR’s accessibility is a similar side effect to the 3D TVs. Motion sickness caused by VR is so prevalent that it even earned it’s own Wikipedia page. While I haven’t been able to find any firm estimates how many people are affected, ranging between 22% and 56% depending on the game played (most studies were done through games), disproportionally affecting women.

With accessibility only increasing, I think VR is likely to stick around. Unlike some of the above flops, VR has had a wide range of both software and hardware support (for users and creators), and demand seems to be growing. Whether or not the film industry adopts 360˚ film as a means of narrative filmmaking, however, may be trickier. Is VR a gimmick? The rate it’s catching on and only continuing to grow, it’s looking like the answer is no. But I don’t think it’s a game-changer either—“flat” films, that is to say traditional films, aren’t going to be replaced. There’s a lot of wonderful cinematic technique that gets lost in 360˚. But hey, I was wrong about the iPad too.