Like every good futurist, I have been wondering about all the new hype around Virtual Reality that was basically kicked off by Oculus Rift. And of course this went into overdrive when Facebook spent a cool $2b to validate the concept. All of a sudden it seems like everyone is doing it. Which makes you wonder if there is something that people in the depth of these tech companies know that we don’t. Maybe there is some super-secret strategy memo that tech CEOs get that we peons don’t have access to?
First I want to be clear about my lens on this – how big can this tech be? Or more precisely I am assuming the interest is because companies think this ‘new’ industry will be eventually as big as or close to the size of the web or mobile – which is essentially what you would need it to be to drive the next wave of tech company growth. By corollary, my lens is not whether VR will be useful in certain applications or have new capabilities that are exciting (this is a given). Instead it’s about wide adoption as a corporate or consumer technology.
The confines of a new industry are well threaded:
- First you need to get over human interaction and cool factor issues – the device has to be something that is useful and intuitive as well as desirable.
- Next you need to have an affordable price point so a lot of people can buy it.
- Third you need to have useful content on the device – generally apps, professional entertainment content or user generated content. This is what makes the other 2 things ignite and generate a mass market. The barrier to apps are basically how accessible the development platform is. The barrier to professional content is basically the cost of encoding abundant professional content into the new format(s). The barriers to user generated content is how well you can distribute easy to use encoders to ordinary people (which partly goes through the same cycle of 1, 2, 3.). Recursion!!
In all 3 things, VR has a significant hurdle to get over: It may be hard to turn VR into walk-about technology; not that it’s required, see XBOX and PlayStation. But more fundamentally, VR forces you to choose more starkly between your world and the virtual world. Something that is less confrontational in say, living room gaming.
However the most significant hurdle will be content. Games are a no-brainer, but beyond that? How can I take a trip through Europe with a small encoding device and then deliver VR content to my friends via Facebook or whatever its successor is? The scarcity of 4K content also shows that even professional content owners can struggle to deliver appropriate content at scale in a short time frame. How hard will it be to do apps? If it takes an order of magnitude more effort than a game, there will be initial roadblocks to mass market consumer ambitions….
The good enough alternative to Virtual Reality is already here – better video, better virtual worlds on a 2 or 3d screen. And this technology is unencumbered by gnarly human factors challenges.
Virtual Reality tech is actually already splintering. Microsoft has a version of this that is basically really Virtual Interactivity, painting virtual interactive objects over the real world. This has real potential of augmenting and improving humanity but may be harder to program. And the HUD will need to disappear a little more than a bulky headset. I hope everyone can remember the Augmented Reality boomlet of a few years ago in the mobile app space that did not quite explode.
It’s really hard to anticipate the future. But my bet is that if this section of innovation is to take over the world, one should not pay as much attention to Occulus Rift as to people quietly building specialty processors, content encoders, UI standards, programming interfaces and tech that makes wearables become virtually invisible in everyday life. It’s really hard to bet against the future but given the many open questions about how fast VR and VI can grow to even rival the gaming market, it might not be the savior people expect.
