Jumping into VR with the Oculus Go, a B2B Perspective
The Oculus Go is the first mass-market-aimed standalone VR device, released in May 2018 at a $199 price point. After years of development and aggressive cost cutting, is VR ready for prime time with the general public? What does this device herald to come over the next few years? Here are some impressions after a week with the device, with an eye towards B2B applications.
In a world of hype-driven pre-announcements of tech products, Amazon has pulled a rabbit out of its hat by announcing the Oculus Go and having plentiful stock available for shipping right away. I was able to purchase a retail unit on the day of the announcement have it shipped via Amazon from the US to Asia within a week. In addition, there have been no wide reports of stock-outs so far, which are sometimes used with a new product to generate headlines signaling overflowing demand. A cynical observer may conclude that this indicates a lack of demand, but it feels refreshing to go through a new product launch without the usual logistical issues.
My interest in VR stems from neither gaming nor interest in being on the cutting edge, but rather in evaluating commercially available technology for business adoption, including B2B or B2B2C purposes. When businesses adopt a new piece of technology, it needs to work, and be supportable for non-technical users. This article serves as an introduction to VR on the Oculus Go, as well as the state of VR in terms of applicability to a B2B service offering. I will address potential B2B use cases in a future article.
The quick review is that while the Oculus Go is still on the leading edge of technology adoption, it functions very well as an ambassador for VR to the masses. Because it is a standalone compact unit, there is no PC configuration necessary, nor are there a mess of wires to plug in. And because special setup is unnecessary beyond the in-device tutorials, the Go is user-friendly and easy to figure out. From the user’s visual perspective, regarding the resolution of the device, it’s on par or better than other available VR units, but the status quo is quite pixellated compared to existing smartphones, giving one the impression that one is observing the “SD” version of an “HD” world. Finally, in order to get to the $199 price point, the Oculus Go tracks only head rotation, known as 3DOF tracking, making it ideal for use while standing in one location rather than moving around a room, and it features one controller rather than one for each hand. The tradeoffs Facebook has made in creating this product serve very well to enlarge the market for potential VR users by lowering the cost and emphasizing simplicity rather than trying to push the performance curve.
Virtual Reality, or VR, is the creation of an artificial environment and the immersion of a user into that environment.
It’s useful to understand a bit about virtual reality and VR terminology in order to understand the design decisions that Facebook has made in releasing this device. In addition to covering the basics, we’ll also look at some of the other competitors that have announced products at the same time.
Virtual Reality, or VR, is the creation of an artificial environment and the immersion of a user into that environment. This is done via a headset the the user wears, which encompasses the user’s vision. The VR headset broadcasts an image to each of the user’s eyes, as well as sound to the user’s ears, generating a virtual three-dimensional viewscape and soundscape around the user. Simultaneously, the headset can track the position of the user’s head and (optionally) body, enabling interaction between the user and the virtual landscape or virtual objects.
The fidelity of the virtual experience depends on both how well the virtual environment can be represented to the user, as well as how well the user’s interactions and movements can be tracked.
The fidelity of the virtual experience depends on both how well the virtual environment can be represented to the user, as well as how well the user’s interactions and movements can be tracked. Because the environment is presented through the user’s eyes, the resolution of the display is directly related to the degree of detail that can be presented to the user. And because the displays sit only within inches of the eyes, the pixels are even more visible than they would be in a screen at laptop or smartphone distance. In order to properly calibrate expectations for the current generation of VR headsets, the image looks like grainy TV footage. Given the price target required for wide adoption, the display technology and electronics to power the graphics will need to improve manyfold over the next few years in order to simulate lifelike environments. Currently, the technology works best with cartoon-like virtual environments, as these are the types of environments that can be rendered and displayed on today’s hardware. And it’s not just the Oculus Go — in comparison, the Lenovo Mirage Solo, a $399 standalone VR headset announced at the same time as the Go, uses the same resolution displays, and therefore has a similar level of visual fidelity.
The second aspect of the VR experience has to do with the user interaction. The Oculus Go tracks the most important part of the body, the head, with a 3DOF motion sensor. This means that it tracks the orientation of the user’s head, as the head moves through its roll, pitch and yaw axes. A user is able to turn around, as well as look up and down, and the headset will compensate the view so that it looks to the user like he or she is looking around the virtual environment. This works perfectly for VR while standing in place or sitting down. More capable headsets use 6DOF (six degrees of freedom), which not only allows head tracking, but also lateral movement tracking, such as having the user walk about a room. In a headset such as the Mirage Solo, this is accomplished by having extra sensors to track the position of the user in the room, in the form of cameras pointed outwards from the device.
Another aspect of user interaction is user input. Some devices have motion-tracked controllers for both the left and right hands, allowing both hands to interact with the virtual environment. The Oculus Go uses a single controller, which can be specified to be the left or right hand, and includes buttons and a scroll pad with which to interact with the environment presented in the headset. The choice to use a single controller fits both the goals of simplicity of interaction for the user, as well as low cost. The single controller has the ability to track its own position and orientation in 3D space, and it is usually represented as a laser pointer in the virtual environment.
Until now, virtual reality has been characterized by bulky devices with streams of cables that connect a headset to a host PC with a powerful graphics card, or shells that host an expensive smartphone as the display. The Oculus Go is the first consumer-targeted device that is a self-contained unit at a relatively mass market price. It’s compactness and design as a single purpose VR device is a great jump in usability for the consumer. An initial set-up process requires an iOS or Android mobile device to create an account and optionally input payment information for the Oculus App Store, but after that, every interaction is done through the headset itself.
It’s compactness and design as a single purpose VR device is a great jump in usability for the consumer.
From a software perspective, the Go is built on Android and covers the basics of today’s mobile device experience: it includes an app store, a web browser, and a media player for local content. In addition it includes links to browse VR content from around the web, including 360 immersive videos of sports and news. The majority of the apps in the app store are, understandably, games, as well as a few media players such as Netflix. Interestingly, it looks like Facebook has been able to get around Apple’s usual restrictions on in-app purchase. You input your credit card directly into the app, and you are able to purchase items from the Oculus App Store from within the Oculus iOS app without going through ApplePay. You can also purchase titles directly from the device itself (which is protected by a four digit PIN that you set up).
The software experience is generally smooth, and while I haven’t encountered any crashes, there are some indicators that this is a 1.0 release. There are places where the interface slightly lags as the user is waiting for the UI to catch up to a user operation, though I would expect these to be fixed as Facebook has time to optimize the software.
The hardware experience is similarly solid. While any headset could always be lighter and less intrusive, it is comfortable enough for the two to three hour sessions that the battery allows. Because this is a standalone device, it’s easy to find a comfortable position, including standing, sitting or lying down. Occasionally you may need to recalibrate the orientation of the device, for instance if you want to stand facing a different direction and specify that direction as “forward” in your virtual world. This is done by pushing a special button on the controller, and it works independently of any app running on the device.
We are at the beginning of the VR revolution, and the capability of the devices and level of immersion will only increase over time. Businesses are notoriously finicky customers, and in general are never early adopters. Does the Oculus Go bring VR to a level where it can be adopted as part of a B2B service offering? It’s useful to look at this question from the perspectives of distribution, support and pricing, which are important needs in B2B.
Businesses are notoriously finicky customers, and in general are never early adopters.
In distributing hardware as part of a product or service offering, it’s useful to assume that Murphy’s Law will come into play: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, in unexpected ways. If a device requires networking, it often fails because of some uncontrolled variable in the customer’s network setup. If a device runs on the Windows platform, you can often assume that there will be some background task running on the Windows that will affect your software in a way that you didn’t predict. The way to combat and control these situations as much as possible is to simplify the amount of components that need to work together. The Oculus Go (as well as other standalone VR headsets), provides this simplicity. It’s common to have “hidden” support costs in hardware deployments due to complex arrangements of hardware, that end up pulling thin SAAS profit margins into the red. By removing the need for a laptop, cabling and external graphics card, the VR device becomes much easier to set up, use, troubleshoot and maintain. And because the device is based on a smartphone hardware as well as Android, the integration is well-understood by manufacturers, leading to more reliable operation.
Another common goal of B2B service offerings today is the use of software-as-a-service (SAAS) pricing, where there can be a tradeoff between upfront hardware costs and ongoing service pricing, in the form of a monthly or yearly subscription. At half the price of the next standalone VR headset (currently the $399 Mirage Solo) and a fraction of the cost of PC-driven headsets, the Oculus Go enables you to distribute and replace headsets at a lower upfront cost, which means a greater percentage of your revenue can be captured as recurring subscription revenue.
This “V1” headset is a great piece of hardware on which to build and distribute a “V1” service
The Oculus Go headset is the first VR headset that I would consider to be a good candidate for distribution in a B2B context, given its integrated nature, simplified UI, solid software performance and low cost. There are caveats, regarding the “low resolution” of VR headsets in general, but if that is not a great concern, this “V1” headset is a great piece of hardware on which to build and distribute a “V1” service.
Finally, looking to the future, there is an elephant in the room, in the question of “What will Apple do?” Famously, Apple has entered the industries of MP3 players, smartphones and smartwatches, and while not being the first player in those spaces, has created the devices that have dominated those industries. Is it important in a B2B context to consider what Apple’s play will be, and how that will affect current plans?
At this point, if you consider VR as a platform on which you are developing and deploying a service that you will sell in a B2B context, the answer is no. You will always want to choose the most reliable product on which to build your service. It’s likely that Apple’s product is years away, and when it is released, you will be able to evaluate and support it, if it fits your business model. We can expect a lot of activity over the next few years, as Facebook, Google, Apple and other tech giants add VR to their platforms, and foster the proliferation of VR hardware. For now, the Oculus Go is a solid step towards a business-friendly, distributable, supportable VR headset.
