
Agree or Disagree: VR will be a bigger market in retail locations than the home - meltzerj
Let&#x27;s have a debate...
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SyneRyder
Someone ran a VR arcade of 2 HTC Vive units at my local suburban shopping
center during the last school holidays. They charged $15 per game, and while
there weren't long queues, there was lots of interest. So I sat at a cafe next
door and started counting players - they were doing somewhere between $200 -
$300 an hour in revenue, and that was during a slightly off-peak time too.

They disappeared after a couple of weeks (it was only ever a popup shop), so I
don't know if interest trailed off or not. (I never got around to playing it
myself either.) But considering many of the VR games sell for just $5, it made
me feel the money right now is in running the VR arcade, not developing the
software for it!

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RickS
This seems like a quick no - brick and mortar retail (what I take your title's
"locations" to mean) exists only because sufficient information can't always
be gathered online.

Many people go to retail locations only to confirm details for later online
purchases. This is already happening and has a name - "showrooming".

VR will close this gap by bringing the retail location TO the home.

For example: I don't buy clothes online because it's important to see how they
fit on me specifically before pulling the trigger. VR that could do this
sufficiently well would totally end my shopping at physical retail locations.

Rephrased as "VR shopping will be a larger market than living room
entertainment", it's a more plausible/even discussion and I don't have as
strong an opinion.

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paulcole
>For example: I don't buy clothes online because it's important to see how
they fit on me specifically before pulling the trigger. VR that could do this
sufficiently well would totally end my shopping at physical retail locations.

Hate to burst your bubble, but quality control from mass market clothing
brands is going to keep this from becoming reality. Levi's, for example can
vary several inches between garments of the same listed size.

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JimmyAustin
I suspect it's cheaper to tighten the thresholds then to pay for multiple
retail outlets.

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paulcole
I'd wager that it probably isn't. Too much variation in fabric, manufacturing,
etc. might just make it impossible for hugely mass-produced clothing to have
really low variability.

Sure, opening more stores might be very expensive, but it's a known cost and a
goal that's known to be achievable.

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matchagaucho
The more impactful debate, for me, is VR vs AR.

Really hoping the Magic Leap augmented reality experience matches the hype.

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saurik
I bet people occasionally said the same thing about video games in the late
70s; and, in fact, for quite a while, arcades were "the thing": but, now?...
the idea of an arcade is almost more of an item of nostalgia. Sure: while VR
is expensive and content is limited and peoples' living areas are still
designed around heavy couches pointed at media centers, the "VR Arcade" at
your local retail location is going to be a big deal (and I am even thinking
of setting one up at my office, not for any hope of a profit, but to get more
opportunities with users to hone VR use cases; I am located in a dense college
town and while doing some demos with a Vive people have actually already asked
me about setting up a location they could rent), but in the long term (and the
real question here is not "if" but "when", as "long term" might only be a
couple years: I doubt there will be a similar twenty year lag as we saw with
early video games) people are going to have cheap, portable, quality VR
experiences at home; and, if VR is ever actually popular, over time the notion
of a living/family room will transition to have the property of "is easily
cleared to allow for room-scale VR". (I mean, for a trivial example of this
happening: DDR was one of the final things that kept old-school arcades alive,
but portable DDR mats and later the Kinect combined with increasing general
interest in this class of game, and now the big market for this is at home,
not at retail locations, even despite that being able to play the game with
random interested strangers whom you later got to know in real life would have
seemed to me to be a major drawing point :/. Many of my friends now have their
couches and televisions set up with enough room to let them play dancing games
or team music games, which would have sounded way too involved before these
games became popular, the equipment cheaper, and the concepts simpler.)

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qwrusz
What do you mean retail locations? Do you mean stores or do you mean VR
theater/arcade type services?

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novoreality
consumer headsets (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Playstation VR) will represent a
bigger market at first but then it will stall, allowing location-based VR
centers to surpass it and maintain their lead

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kj01a
So we're going back to arcades?!

