My Voyage to Virtual Reality II — The Bitter Pill Redux
The Numbers Never Lie… ((HOUSTON, WE HAVE A REAL PROBLEM!!!))

I really should end the reality check right here in my “Voyage to Virtual Reality II”. I started writing my 6 weeks of initial findings from mid-May to end of June earlier this year during early summer and was completely lost. I wasn’t happy with the tone of my findings. I thought I had no professional standing to be as harsh with my findings in Part I of this series (which I might just keep in-house), so I held off publishing and it kicked around in my “drafts” — I even deleted it after publishing it by mistake. Until I saw this:
http://www.pcgamer.com/htc-could-be-getting-out-of-the-vr-business/
But please say it out loud, but don’t say it proud:
FIVE. HUNDRED. SIXTEEN. MIILLLLLIIIIIOOOOON. DOLLARS.LOST.
TRANSLATION: Heads are rolling in silicon valley circa 1600 Ampitheatre Parkway Mountainview, CA after HTC has received a CRITICAL blow from the market at large. In terms of them understanding their core market’s (if there was ever one to begin with) real problems, this is an unbelievable level of failure and marketplace rebuke.

Why should I care? I’m a consumer, am I not? Am I not the target market answer to their lofty mission statement,
“Virtual Reality for everyone. We’re on a mission to bring amazing experiences to the world.” — Google
But…but,
“Something for Everybody is something for nobody.”— James McNabb (UX Instructor at RED Academy Toronto, Product Designer)
The beauteous promise of VR is how easily it can be seen as an amazing solution to so many of the world’s challenges in medicine, architecture, entertainment and so much more.

The honest problem of VR is that it has so much “potential” to solving such a vast array of problems that there has been no developed focus on one subset industry in particular to date. So, it’s just about impossible to grasp what value the platform can actually produce given an absolute focal point. What are the real problems that virtual reality has solved or more importantly, can solve?
Focus creates a Call-To-Action
Call-To-Action is based on communicating an actionable solution that is the narrowed-focus of a targeted buyer. It finds the person inside the crowd at the marketplace, identifies their experience as a real problem and pitches to them a direct solution via an “on-message” product offering.
Scalability
Starting small with a niche market, developing a usable model that has found its specific delivery point in the marketplace and then scaling outwards. This has been the workable formula for pretty much every product developed and mass-produced in the history of mankind. From the first stonewheels to the printing press. Today we call it UX. User Experience — based product design.
It seems that what VR is missing is its UX. To the tune of -$516,000,000.00 by an industry flagship giant in Google’s HTC Vive. The genesis of this reality check can be traced back to a Giant putting their finger on the scale and forgetting the true metrics and weight of what the product must produce in the marketplace.
My research did not tell a different story:
Cost & Accessibility are the most obvious pain points being ignored:

Every single person I interviewed expressed the exact same pain points. Whether they had access to VR or not: COST + ACCESS = No VR.
In my research I went to the best and the brightest:

This is what Henry Faber of Gamma Space had to say in terms of the link between inclusivity to engenuity:
“I’ve got a lot of money, you know like, you know running studios and doing stuff and the stuff is garbage because they’re not really thinking about it, about what’s good for the medium. They’re not thinking about different voices, different narratives. They’re not thinking about different potentials. All the real creativity happens from communities that are really pushing the boundaries. So our space, Gamma Space, and like working with people like Dames Making Games, is all about providing access to the communities that wouldn’t normally get a chance to do it. So, that’s why I work with women and people of color and indigenous groups to like help make content that I think that everyone’s going to be excited about.”
As the far as the UI (User Interface) is concerned, which is the cover of the book that makes a user want to read the contents, I’m not sure where to begin:

Conclusion
Macro-ideas do not really solve micro-challenges. The technology in today’s VR headset and set up will not be the ones used if there is to be any scaled to mass adoption. Essentially putting a bulky computer-processor on top of people’s faces has been a marketplace loser and will continue to be so as long as human beings continue being humans.
Google Glass was another massive failure to understand basic human behaviour because the makers of the technology were focused on the technology and not the adaptation of said technology to its users.
Next-up, they will try to tell us we need driver-less cars that cannot adjust to oil spills, potholes and pedestrians as well as pilot-less passenger airplanes that can crash midair amidst a flock of birds.
I do not like that feeling of getting guinea-pigged but these tech companies are in such a rush to be first to market that they too often forget that there are real people who do not need more problems from their ill-fitting solutions that oft seem to be conceived by someone trying to play God.
Whatever happened to “TEST EARLY, TEST OFTEN???” or the other UX mantra which was proclaimed by a UX instructor at RED Academy, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”? In relation to designing the perfect product that sails through user testing unscathed.
Tech needs human-centred design. Being a great search engine computer sciences company does not always translate to realizing good human sciences company practices. We cut Google and many big companies a lot of slack in their prototype stage but what they must understand is that we, the consumer, will be merciless when it comes to investing our budgets in marketed products that were never really designed for us or with us.
If indeed Google drops out of the VR marketplace, it will hurt. But their lack of dollars might finally help spur some sense into makers. Less = more. Scale back the over-investments/commercialization aspects and knuckle down on what is absolutely essential. Go back to low fidelity prototyping because the current product is a lemon that no one quite seems to know how to make into consumable lemonade.
Status
Next Stop: This week I just got the call from FIVARS (Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories — founders of VRTO) Festival around TIFF — fivars.net. At The STORIES-FIVARS 2017 I will be a helping hand all three days at the House of VR from September 15th-17th where they will host 30 experiences from 14 countries. What I like about film VR/360/AR (especially) is that it is a tool to connect and deliver poignant emotional, social messages. VR is just the stage here and not the main action.