The killer app for virtual reality
If you are in the VR industry yourself, maybe have a start-up in VR, maybe an investor in VR, or maybe just a enthusiast following the technology, you might know that the industry has being moving very slowly. Just yesterday, AltspaceVR, one of the leading social VR app, announced that they had to shut down due to the slow market adoption and lack of funding. It was a very sad goodbye as AltspaceVR was one of the first attempts to achieve the ultimate dream for VR technology — a brand new metaverse. Similarly oversea in China, a large amount of VR companies died out in late 2016 as well due to lack of funding and slow market adoption.
So is virtual reality going to end up being just a hype? And what is causing the slow adoption of VR technology? If you ask around the VR community, there are many answers; price of VR headsets are too expensive, VR isn’t marketed properly, the current generation of headsets aren’t powerful enough, more people need to own a headset etc. But if you ask someone why wouldn’t they buy a VR headset, the answer is unanimous, “I don’t know what to use it for”.
The number one cause for slow adoption of VR technology is the lack of good quality content. But this is a chicken and egg problem. Building high quality VR content is very expensive and time consuming, and without more users, content creators are hesitant on spending the resources to build good quality content, especially as most VR startups are struggling to get users and funding. So to solve this problem, the hardware either need to get really good and affordable, such that people would buy a headset regardless of content, or, someone need to build the killer app for virtual reality.
Well then, what is the killer app? Well if I can answer that question I’d be building it myself. After all, this is the billion dollar question. However, I do have some theory of why the killer app doesn’t exist yet.
First of all, let’s look at the different type of VR experiences from the least interactive to the most interactive.

On one end, we have passive VR experiences which are 360 videos and films. 360 videos and films have become popular as 360 cameras are now getting cheaper and more accessible. YouTube and Facebook support of 360 content have also allowed more people to easily upload their own. On the higher end we have studios like Felix and Paul and Baobab studio, who are building high quality 360 film experiences.
On the other side, we have full on VR games like Elite Dangerous, Job Simulator, Robo Recall and such, triple A quality VR games that’s currently available on Steam and the Oculus Store. These are commonly referred as active VR experiences, where user has to constantly make interaction to enjoy the experience. In the middle are a mix of active and passive VR experiences. We are seeing a lot of non-gaming applications like real estate tours, Google maps (streetview is essentially a gigantic 360 tour) and some tourism VR apps. These are referred to as hybrid VR experiences.
Now in terms of supported hardware:

The more interactive the experience is, the more expensive the hardware requirement. 360 videos and films can be easily viewed in the browser, or using a Cardboard or Gear VR headset. The hybrid VR experiences are mostly built for mobile platforms like Gear VR and Cardboard. This is because they provide the best viewing experience (with limited control as well using included remote) without the hassle and the price of the PC level headsets. And the video games mostly require a top tier VR headset. As you can see, the general level of accessibility is as follows:

The cheaper the platform, the more accessible the content, the easier it is to distribute the content and acquire users. On the downside, the passive VR experiences aren’t as engaging and immersive as the ones on high end VR headsets. In term of general spread of the different types of experiences we see something like this:

The easy access to customers allows more people to build passive 360 VR experiences. And the strong immersion of high end VR experiences are driving people to assemble large teams to build awesome games like Job Simulator and Robo Recall. However, we are seeing a lack of content in the hybrid VR experiences despite having decent reach and plenty of use case and it is because…

Building interactive VR content is hard. 360 videos and film can be easily made with either consumer level cameras then distributed on Facebook or YouTube, or if you want get fancier, use a studio quality camera like the GoPro Omni and add additional post effect through Adobe Premier and other video editing software. But as soon as you want to add any interactivity in your VR experience, you need to use a game engine or write your own custom code. Not only that, you’ll need to learn an entire suite of 3D software and concepts. To many talented creative talent who can write a great story, this level of transition is completely foreign to them. They now need to find an entire development team. While we (my co-founder and I) were attending Oculus Connect 3 a year ago, we’ve met many developers who are looking for artists and artists who are looking for developers. As without the right team, no great ideas come to fruition.
This is even harder for the hybrid VR experiences, as not only you’d need the same level of skill to build these as building a video game, you also have to consider optimization for mobile to ensure a smooth experience. This may come as a surprise to many non-developers reading this article, but making mobile VR is much harder than PC VR. While PC based VR is capable of more features, these projects are typically done by a larger team and they don’t have to worry about frame rate optimization as much (this is also why PC VR require an expensive computer). As a result, we are seeing very little high quality mobile VR experiences being developed.
Mobile VR is where we’ll see the next killer app. Mobile VR headsets are getting more affordable, to the point where the general public is willing to purchase a headset despite having few content (or send it as a gift to a friend’s birthday or during Christmas). But we need more people developing mobile VR experiences, and to do so, the barrier of entry need to be lower. The killer app isn’t going to be the next triple A video game, or it might not even be a video game at all. What it need is to enhance what people already do in their daily lives, and be able to be accessed by a bigger audience.
And this is our startup’s mission. To accelerate the adoption of virtual reality by making content creation easier. We see web and mobile as the platform for the next killer app to be created on, and we are making a tool that allow anyone to easily build mobile and web VR. When more people start to build VR content, maybe we’ll finally find that killer app for virtual reality.
Babylon VR is building a Saas platform for anyone to build Web VR content. We are currently in our open beta, feel free to sign-up at www.babylonvr.ca and we’d love to hear your feedback!
