Virtual fail
What Exactly Is Amazon’s Stance on AR and VR?
A quick history of the tech giant’s investments in the increasingly popular field
In 2019, Amazon released the first Echo Frames, a device based on Amazon Alexa that allowed users to listen to various audio apps and engage in calls. Matthew Ball, a virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) expert notes these were intended to be AR glasses as Amazon had begun investments in the field two to three years prior. Yet, neither the first nor second editions of the Echo Frames have an AR-based screen or some sort of display. In fact, Amazon seems to be the only company part of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook/Meta, Apple, & Microsoft) that hasn’t had its name tied to an AR or VR headset — Apple has the VisionPro, Meta has the Meta Quest, Microsoft has HoloLens, and Google is reportedly trying to build a VR headset with Nintendo.
The likely reason is that Amazon does not currently see AR or VR as a priority.
In terms of gaming, a field expected to correlate to AR/VR via hardware, payment solutions, and graphics, Ball notes that Amazon spent more on one season of Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power than it did annually on gaming. LOTR is only one show, albeit the biggest, among the company’s seventy or so shows.
The company’s reasoning is fair, though, considering most of its gaming efforts have been unsuccessful — many of its game studios’ titles were canceled before release. The titles that did make it out initially had strong releases but failed to accumulate significant user counts. New World had close to 15 million total users, and Lost Ark peaked at 1.3 million users. As a point of comparison, Fortnite has around 80 million active monthly users.
While these titles were intended to garner more than just players, as Bezos had set out to build “computationally ridiculous games.” Whether Amazon Game Studios achieved Bezos’ vision, I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But without players, it’s harder to improve computation — generally, more players mean more revenue, which leads to more developers and investment, and so on. The fewer the players, the less investment there probably will be. Amazon also attempted to build a cross-platform game engine — Lumberyard — but it wasn’t adopted, leading Amazon to contribute the engine to the Linux Foundation.
In short, Amazon has failed to become a true competitor in the gaming industry (besides the fact that they own Twitch). In terms of its direct interaction with AR/VR, Amazon released Sumerian, an “all-in-one development platform” for AR and VR apps on smartphones, headsets, and, eventually, browsers. However, this seems to have been discontinued as of May 2022. Amazon has also had various AR shopping features like Room Decorator, which enabled users to see various pieces of furniture in their room, and Virtual Try-On for Shoes, which, as the name says, allowed users to see how a shoe might look on them. While it’s unknown how many users there have been for these features, Snap, as a point of comparison, has said more than 250 million users have engaged with their AR shopping lenses over 5 billion times.
Still, these efforts feel somewhat small compared to the rest of GAFAM, which seems to be the likely reality. Amazon doesn’t consider AR/VR a priority, nor has the idea been successful. If and when the Metaverse or VR-based reality is realized, Amazon owns 33% of cloud infrastructure, which one can assume will be valuable with VR’s heavy computational demands.
But until then, Amazon remains poorly positioned for the AR and VR market.
P.S. My apologies for not following my weekly frequency — I’m hoping to get another article later this week. Regardless, thanks for reading!
