VR hardware, with the wireless Quest and its eventual successors, is ready for the mainstream.
VR software is not.
What drives an industry is value, whether business or recreational. While VR software has typically focused on entertainment value (and there is a lot there), business-driven VR software hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves. But thus far no killer-app of VR has been made. There is no excel, no word, no browser. But there could be, if more people thought about and identified what VR hardware can do that no other platform can. Moreover, its value needs to be a 10x moment. Minor improvements will not cause mass adoption.
So what can VR provide that other platforms can’t?
1) 3D Space
This is the first thing people think of, but is the least important. There are few business tasks that can’t be done on a 2D plane, and the value of going 3D (such as in industrial design) is not a 10x improvement over real-life prototyping.
2) Unlimited space
This also provides less value than it seems. A human can only be in one place, and our vision can only encompass so much area. There is a low upper-bound on how much space a human being can use.
3) Presence
The feeling of “being there” is something VR does 10x better than other platforms. This has been leveraged by entertainment software to good effect. However, the nature of recreational user experience — gameplay experience — doesn’t hinge upon presence in a location. VR games can induce strong presence while still not providing value with strong gameplay experience.
4) Social Presence
This is where VR hardware has the greatest possible leverage and impact. When you play poker in VR, you see this most clearly — people spend more time interacting with one another than actually playing poker. Even with cartoonish avatars, the feeling of being in the presence of another person is practically the same as being in the same room with them. There is large room for growth in improving social presence, but even the early state of VR software is 10x better than what exists elsewhere.
If there is to be a killer business app for VR, it will be akin to excel. But instead of transforming numbers and formulas, it will transform communication and relationships. Whatever replaces Facebook, video chat, JIRA, Reddit, Tinder, or even email will be done on VR/AR.
The gold is there waiting to be picked up. It’s just up to some great company to do it.
You're definitely right about social presence being the key but I think combining it with the other strengths of VR will be what produces a killer app. 3D space and unlimited space by themselves may not win out but sharing those spaces with other people is a huge multiplier. Conferencing comes to mind where you could have the Twitch of business/industry conferences so instead of attending a small handful during a year you would be able to organize and attend spur of the moment conferences focused on a recent development or regular get togethers for professionals to network and share ideas. Also, we may be able to do most work on a 2D plane but we collaborate more effectively in the physical world, instead of endless email threads, Slack chaos and video calls it would be much more effective to sit in a virtual room together talking, working, and sharing information the same way we would hash things out in real life but without the requirement of being in the same office or finding a suitable location. Personally I think education will be the big winner, VR already provides all the necessities of a classroom and offers to add a lot more value by having interactive components and keeping the social dynamic of attending lectures and study groups in person all while making the facilities cheaper and wider reaching.
Regarding points 2 and 3, I have the opposite impression. You can't actually walk anywhere larger then your room and you can't touch anything. If you lean in to get a closer look, you can't focus on the thing close to your face (and it'll be low res). You're right that clever software might fix some of this (better ways to "walk"), but hardware has a ways to go to get higher resolution, a focal distance that isn't a constant couple yards away, and tactile feedback. And solving the last mile of comfort and nausea.
True. I feel like all the inconvenience that comes with VR would be justifiable, if it could actually create true immersion. But it can't and never will.
Basic problems of VR aren't solvable. Just to fix motion sickness once and for all, there would have to be a device that fucks with the vestibular system or something that moves the player in the real world at close the velocity that the player is moving in the virtual world (Like a giant crane or something).I really can only see VR working as like a public thing where you go with friends in your free time similar to a cinema. Maybe "VR cafes" could be a thing in the future, like those gaming cafes are in south Korea. For home consumers VR-gaming will always stay just a fun addition to regular gaming, as they will never be able to afford the hardware that can make a VR experience not suck. I think it would be a huge success already if studios would make there regular games naively playable in VR. I think it says a lot about VR software that beat sabers is still the most popular VR game although it does not even try to use the full potential that VR truly has. Could as well be a mediocre Wii game.
VR hardware is awful. It's bulky, uncomfortable, and annoying.
Until VR headsets are as light and unobtrusive as a pair of ordinary glasses, VR will never become mainstream.
Even ordinary glasses are unacceptable to many people for aesthetic reasons, despite being much lighter, less obtrusive, more comfortable, and more convenient than VR headsets, which look even geekier than glasses.
That's what John Carmack says. He's said that VR headgear needs to get down to swim-goggle size to become mainstream, and down to eyeglass size to become pervasive. He's probably right.
Last time I went skiing I realized ski goggles could very easily become the future of VR/AR/mobile phones/headphones/sunglasses/fashion/ski goggles! They are big enough to handle the current electronics needed (including batteries/radios), they cover your ears so can include microphones, cover your eyes entirely so can do VR/AR, and already look kind of cool and are associated with cool activities. They’re easy to pull up and store on top of your head when you’re not using them too.
> VR hardware has the greatest possible leverage and impact
Highfidelity tried to do that and it failed miserably. I think their major problem were the controls - they refused to add text chat and people felt incapacitated in a social environment. Second life, with its old graphics, still does it 100 times better using just a screen
Agreed. I also dive deeper into some of your points in these two blog posts, and mention new ones (remote work, "TikTok of VR", creating a movie in VR etc.):
I forgot to mention that fitness is a uniquely great use case for VR. I use my Quest daily to work out cardio and core (Box VR and Thrill of the Fight are awesome for this)
You might be interested in our project at Mozilla, Hubs [1]. It’s focused on multi user avatar communication in mixed media spaces, and supports VR for the reasons you mention.
Next year, we will be releasing a version that makes it easy to run your own custom server on cloud providers. Our thesis is that this will open up a lot of use cases, especially for enteprises.
the problem I see with 4 is that the best VR experience (Oculus) is pretty much closed and kept in tight grip by Facebook. So if anyone ever starts to make any progress on a Social Presence app, it's unlikely Facebook will just "let it happen" - in particular because Horizon seems to be the end-all of VR for them, so the first wave of developers that try to do any baseline experience will probably be either kicked out of the platform or never allowed in.
I imagine a "content kit" is in the works as part of Horizon, to enable developers to build their own experiences within the Facebook VR universe. That _may_ be game changing for consumers, but I wouldn't hold my breath as the potential as a developer.
To be honest, I feel that Oculus/Facebook are really fair with their headsets. All of their headsets can natively play SteamVR titles and there is no major gatekeeping in that direction. Sure, they do have criteria for getting included in their store but they are not blocking anyone from using other kind of software.
With Oculus Quest, they are even slightly allowing "unofficial" content on the device with sideloading APKs onto the device. They could close everything down if they wanted but they seem to be quite fair so far.
As a developer, you can stay on SteamVR and ignore Oculus. If your content is good, people will use their Oculus headsets with SteamVR to access your content.
VR software is not.
What drives an industry is value, whether business or recreational. While VR software has typically focused on entertainment value (and there is a lot there), business-driven VR software hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves. But thus far no killer-app of VR has been made. There is no excel, no word, no browser. But there could be, if more people thought about and identified what VR hardware can do that no other platform can. Moreover, its value needs to be a 10x moment. Minor improvements will not cause mass adoption.
So what can VR provide that other platforms can’t?
1) 3D Space
This is the first thing people think of, but is the least important. There are few business tasks that can’t be done on a 2D plane, and the value of going 3D (such as in industrial design) is not a 10x improvement over real-life prototyping.
2) Unlimited space
This also provides less value than it seems. A human can only be in one place, and our vision can only encompass so much area. There is a low upper-bound on how much space a human being can use.
3) Presence
The feeling of “being there” is something VR does 10x better than other platforms. This has been leveraged by entertainment software to good effect. However, the nature of recreational user experience — gameplay experience — doesn’t hinge upon presence in a location. VR games can induce strong presence while still not providing value with strong gameplay experience.
4) Social Presence
This is where VR hardware has the greatest possible leverage and impact. When you play poker in VR, you see this most clearly — people spend more time interacting with one another than actually playing poker. Even with cartoonish avatars, the feeling of being in the presence of another person is practically the same as being in the same room with them. There is large room for growth in improving social presence, but even the early state of VR software is 10x better than what exists elsewhere.
If there is to be a killer business app for VR, it will be akin to excel. But instead of transforming numbers and formulas, it will transform communication and relationships. Whatever replaces Facebook, video chat, JIRA, Reddit, Tinder, or even email will be done on VR/AR.
The gold is there waiting to be picked up. It’s just up to some great company to do it.