How Mark Zuckerberg lost $60 billion in five years

• Have you bought a virtual reality or augmented reality headset?
• If so, you're part of a small group of consumers — despite repeated predictions that the market will boom.
• Meta alone has lost $60 billion on this tech over five years. It's going to keep spending, says Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg has spent tens of billions of dollars chasing it. Some of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Sony, have poured in billions more. For years.

But so far, no one has nailed it.

Maybe one day wearing computers on our heads will be something many of us do all the time, instead of a novelty we try a few times and then forget. We're not there yet.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about super high-end devices like the Apple Vision Pro or low-priced novelties, like early editions of Snap's Spectacles. Or whether you're discussing virtual reality devices that create an entirely new world around the user or augmented reality headsets that let you see the outside world as well as digital images. All of these devices have yet to take off. Consumer demand isn't budging.

That hasn't stopped the tech industry from trying. Or deterred people around the tech world from predicting that one day, this will be a huge market.

You can see this spelled out in a new chart from analyst and investor Matthew Ball, as part of a new report he's released on the problems in the video gaming business. This one tracks the gap between projected headset sales, as estimated by International Data Corp., and actual sales.

As you can see, while IDC has been continually bullish about VR and AR headsets, consumer interest has lagged far behind. No matter what's on offer, at whatever price, these devices seem mired in the 10 million units a year or less range.

That's not to suggest that Zuckerberg — who has racked up more than $60 billion in losses on this tech over the past five years, filings show — is chasing after the market because of an IDC estimate. It just shows you that for close to a decade, the industry has been excited about this stuff, while many consumers remain unimpressed.

I talked to Jitesh Ubrani, the IDC researcher who works on this stuff, about the gap between his company's projections — which, to be fair, are projections — and reality.

He said his shop has become less optimistic over time about the market, which you can see reflected on the right side of the chart.

"Everyone is a bit more realistic about these expectations," he said, noting that the market for the tech has been "notably volatile" over the past few years, as big players like Microsoft and Google temper their interest in headsets. Meta PR declined to comment.

In his public comments, Zuckerberg has been telling investors that he'll continue chasing virtual and augmented reality tech, and that they should expect to see more losses in the future.

For him, the stakes seem quite clear: He wants people to use a new computing platform instead of, or in addition to, phones. And he wants to be able to interact with them on that platform without Google or Apple getting involved, as they do with their mobile platforms. And if all of that happens — meaning that Zuckerberg essentially creates the next iPhone — then burning tens of billions on R&D will seem like a good bet.

Meanwhile, Meta does seem to be making progress. The Orion glasses Zuckerberg showed off last fall — but isn't selling yet — are super-impressive. I've tried them, and I could definitely imagine using some version of them if they were way cheaper, and worked as advertised.

But those are big ifs, and it's possible Meta never figures out how to make these things at scale, and in a way that will sell hundreds of millions of units per year — like Apple does with its phones. But someone, somewhere, will keep insisting that the headset of the future is just around the corner.