Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee (Tom Cruise): I think I’m entitled to them.
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can’t handle the truth!
If you’re like me you would have probably used this phrase as a means to convey a joke or emphasize a lofty statement. But the latter often would deter people from willingly accepting the reality that faces them. In many ways, we could compare that to the Virtual Reality industry with so many enthusiasts openly purchasing tickets to the hype train that was apparently meant to depart back in 2016… So what happened?
To fully understand the nature of the issue it’s important to observe how the current market is behaving. For starters, the most obvious and noteworthy observation is that all appealing VR content currently available, whether that be a new game or interactive video, is accessible primarily on higher end VR headsets such as the HTC Vive, Oculus, or Samsung Gear VR. While these headsets are fantastic they’re not cheap and therefore not within reach for the average consumer. So if we keep making amazing content built for the average person to experience, but are unable to have easy access to view it what would the outcome be? That’s right, a lot of cool stuff but not a lot of wider user adoption. Something that we have heard a lot in the past year or so is the notion of ‘content’.
Content is apparently what the industry needed to either educate or excite the average user to engage people to try VR. Fair, this was an issue a couple of years ago because let’s face it, who really knew what VR could achieve and do? But the question arises here as what next? For the most part people understand what VR is now.
The key here is not necessarily content, but accessibility. For a while we have heard the term “content” as the main cause preventing VR to becoming widespread, but even now with all the amazing content being created around the globe on a daily basis, we are still sitting where we were a year ago in terms of user adoption. With only the developer community and early adopters flooding the market to eagerly try the latest shooter or simulator. The reality is that VR and related technologies is still a small club of aspiring techies. To get over this hump, the answer lies in how to make the content more accessible to anyone.
Let’s look at a perfect example of a company in the past that understood this barrier and was able to improve on the existing structure to bring more value to the masses. You probably use this companies service on a daily basis, or thrown around some casual slang on a date,
Rise of the Netflix and Chill
Without a doubt, Netflix has risen to be one of the most iconic tech companies in the past 5 years earning its reputation to the immense ease and access that it provided in viewing movies and TV shows. Compare this to its historic competitor, Blockbuster, and you can easily understand how a company that is attuned to meeting the needs of its market can crush a giant like Blockbuster overnight. Without getting into the nitty-gritty specifics, the simple answer was this. It was a barrier for people to go to stores to rent out a film for X number of days to then return it. That’s the problem. Solution: Stream movies and shows from a database online on demand, a.k.a Netflix. In other words remove the barrier of engagement, it makes more sense to just browse in the comfort of your own home and start watching.
Similarly, VR is facing the same problem. The barrier to enter is just too high. Some of you could be saying “well the technology is still not fully developed and therefore not ready for mass adoption”. This is also true since VR technology is still very much improving every day, however the focus of adoption for many evangelists is to keep building content with expectations that people will come.
This does open the discussion to the new concept of ‘arcades ‘ or ‘pay-to-play’ settings where people can try a VR experience for an average of 30mins and sort of get the feel for what VR is all about. Cool. But the bigger question still remains as why am I not able to experience VR in the comfort of my own home? It seems almost archaic to think that if I wanted to experience a piece of technology that is similar to watching a movie I would have to go to a designated place to do so. I mean home theaters are becoming pretty normal these days to put in your basement.
Perhaps it’s time to think more about what would make it easier for our intended user to engage in VR and not expect them to come to us. For now the excitement has drawn healthy amount of attention although it can’t last forever, especially in today’s technology climate where everything is so expected and on demand.
