Joshua Corvinus
Aug 9, 2017 · 4 min read

This whole article is based on a false assumption. You say “normal users don’t care about technical things” but that’s wrong. Normal users don’t understand technical things. Give a casual user a free Vive, and set it up for them. Install the best games and tools, then take the time to find the things they really like. Hold their hand until they really assimilate it and start to love it.

Now take it away and replace it with GearVR, Daydream View w/Pixel, or some other crippled hardware. Replace their real-time rendered experiences with 360 video. Take their hand inputs away. Watch their reaction. They’ll hate it. They’ll immediately feel shackled by the lack of good inputs. They won’t be able to explain it’s because the lower refresh rate w/3dof tracking and no lens adjustment is giving them a headache, but they’ll certainly care.

You also go on to say: “…should have content that people truly needs”

But this is the crux of the issue — just focusing on cheaper headsets and easier setup process does not solve this problem. The only way we will get better content is through better hardware that enables it, and better software that takes advantage of it. Which is not going to be cheap. It’s simply not possible to make VR that is worth using for a low price right now.

People will happily save money for big purchases if they feel as though they’re getting something useful out of it. They’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars on machinery to transport them around the world, and hundreds of thousands on housing. The real problems are the following:

  • We’re not communicating well enough to ‘normal’ users. We need to show them why premium VR is good and cheap VR is bad, not give technical explanations.
  • The industry is making lots of useless garbage, software and hardware, all in the name of “bringing the price down” and “being accessible”. We need to actually start unleashing the power of VR first to show people how it will benefit then and what they can use it for. Doing anything else is putting the cart before the horse.
  • We’re not spending the time or money to do this correctly.

The worst part about this backwards thinking is that it could potentially kill the industry. Without giving users a compelling reason to buy and focusing entirely on price and accessibility, we could be stuck in the awkward position of holding them a plate of dirt and going “Why won’t you eat this, it’s so cheap and accessible?”

Listening to your users is an important part of figuring out where problems lie, but taking their feedback at face value is extremely dangerous. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses

How do I propose we solve this?

  • First, we need an industry-wide boycott on anything below a certain level of quality. Something like the Vive should be the bare minimum acceptable VR system. Single player games should have a minimum play length of 10 hours or so. They should be built from the ground up to take advantage of the strengths of the medium and not be skeuomorphic. All VR platforms should come with body tracking, 6dof head, hand, and eyes (insofar as eyes need 6dof) at a minimum. If a platform doesn’t come with these things, refuse to develop for it and communicate to users (and platform holders) that it is not fit for purpose. Use whatever analogies or experiential comparisons you need, just stay away from citing numbers or specs (unless talking to the platform owner, in which case you must cite numbers and specs).
  • Second, we need to communicate this to key players in the industry. Investors need to be told up front that VR is an extremely difficult technical exercise and will be for the foreseeable future. They need to be told up front that quick ROI is impossible, and that VR investment requires playing the long game. The secret to success here is small teams with low burn rates and long schedules/flexible deadlines. Without this, many investors will continue to get cold feet and leave the market, all because of poor expectation management.
  • Furthermore, we need to stop letting industry take advantage of the fact that end-users are uneducated about VR. We shouldn’t say things like “oh but making a good <x> is hard” or “the market is so small”, and we need to stop chastising people for calling BS on low-effort, low-quality works. We shouldn’t let install base numbers be used to argue for accepting these platforms, especially since on it’s own, install base is a misleading metric (Sure, GearVR has a ton of headsets in the wild — but it was a free-pack in for some phones, so how many of those headsets are real users?). Sure, mobile gaming has the highest number of gamers on the planet right now — but when was the last time a mobile gamer actually paid for something? This brings me to my last point
  • We absolutely must avoid the mobile app-store nightmare of conditioning users to expect things for cheap/free. This is by far the most damaging way events could play out. Making money on a mobile game is basically impossible right now unless you design it to be a wholly abusive, addictive skinnner box with a credit card slot on the side. If this happens with VR we could wind up with an entire populace stuck in mental prisons they cannot escape.

Joshua Corvinus

Written by

Lead developer — Holos, inc. UX/UI nerd and H+ in training.

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