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A few years into consumer VR 2.0, all is not well. But it’s still all good.
Here we are, well into the latest wave of commercializing VR at scale, and many of us wonder when it’s going to achieve its true potential and become a part of people’s everyday lives. We seem to be falling into — depending on whose business writing you read — the Trough of Disillusionment (Gartner), The Chasm (Moore), or the Gap of Disappointment (Riccitiello). What’s it going to take to climb it, cross it, bridge it? I don’t have many answers; but I’d like to share some thoughts and musings.
A Long, Strange Trip
You probably already know that immersive technology has been around for some time now, and there have been a few attempts now to bring this technology of the future into today to make it mainstream.
But you might not know how long VR has been around. Would you believe… almost fifty years? Ivan Sutherland first demonstrated the Sword of Damocles head mounted display in 1968. Interestingly, it was shown at the same ACM computer conference as Douglas Englebart’s “Mother of All Demos”– the first-ever window system, hypertext and networked graphics ever shown. So, yeah, that was crazy a day in (where else) San Francisco back in the 1960's.
These were one-of-a-kind systems, very expensive and only used for deep research and military systems. But just by way of showing that people have been working on this stuff for a long time.
Fast forward twenty plus years to the early 90’s… and the first real attempt to take VR technology mainstream. Companies like Jaron Lanier’s VPL were pioneering VR made out of cheap components and thinking about the dramatic potential for this to change the lives of ordinary people.
The content was crude. We’re talking about scenes composed of hundreds of 3D polygons… and if you know your graphics, you know that isn’t very much. But people were captivated by the possibilities, and there was an explosion of startups, a lot of investments made, headlines in the news and– déjà vu– conferences galore. But still, the cost of getting these systems deployed, and the bulky hardware involved, were non-starters for commercial use. These systems, like their predecessors, ended up being used mostly for research and military simulations.
It was shortly after the collapse of what we think of as consumer VR 1.0 that I entered the picture. I fell in with some refugees from that ill-fated wave, who had set their sights on the Web as the new frontier for human-computer communication. Not content with 2D web pages, a handful of us banded together to create a protocol and software stack for delivering 3D spaces on the web, which came to be known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language, or VRML.
Here’s a young me at the funky South of Market office of my first startup, Intervista Software. VRML had a big industry push, Microsoft, Apple, Netscape, SGI, Oracle, Sun… lots of academics publishing papers about networking, data visualization, design. Now, this was on 2D displays, not HMDs. Just 3D graphics, sent over the wire.
Given how early we were with the tech — computers with processing power measured in megahertz, dialup connections, and folks barely learning how to code for the web — we are able to pull off some pretty great stuff. As long as you had a PC with a fast graphics card… which almost nobody had at the time.
VRML got a lot of hype, a lot of big players were in, lots of money invested. (No that’s not me on the cover of Red Herring…) But eventually it fizzled out. Great idea; sparked a lot of passion; but the time wasn’t right yet. We actually did hit on some of the problems people are trying to solve now in XR, around software infrastructure, sharing 3D information, and online social interaction. But we were, by any measure, way too early.
It turns out it would take another twenty years until people would try again.
In 2011, this guy built a lightweight prototype for consumer VR in his garage. A few years later, and I think you all know the story: Facebook buys Oculus; Google, Valve, HTC and Samsung get in the game; Microsoft announces Hololens; millions of Cardboard viewers stuffed into Christmas stockings and shipped with the Sunday New York times. And these days you can’t swing a dead cat in South Park without hitting a VR or AR startup. So here we are, with the XR revolution still in full swing.
And lately, it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been.
Where Are We Now?
Today there’s still a lot of excitement and industry buzz. But there have also been the inevitable backlash against the hype, and market corrections on startup valuations — both to be expected.
But I think, fundamentally, that we are in the right place at the right time with immersive technology. It really is different now, because three things have changed in significant ways since the last time around:
- VR hardware has gotten cheap enough and small enough that tech enthusiasts and motivated early adopters like gamers can easily try it… and these trends will continue over the net couple of years, to the point where the hardware is affordable and comfortable enough for everyone.
- We have at least a couple of generations of creators who know how to make great 3D content: millions of designers, modelers, animators, and programmers coming from game development, visual effects and motion graphics are now applying those skills to creating XR.
- And finally, most importantly, consumers are ready for this. A generation that grew up playing video games and watching CG movies, and now, their offspring — who don’t even know a world that isn’t interactive. Hand a print magazine to a three year old; what’s the first thing she will do? Tap it; pinch to zoom.
The world is ready for XR.
The other factor driving this is the deployment of market applications across several industries. From use in the creative industry to design, manufacturing, finance, medicine, training, maintenance, sales and support, immersive technology is about more than just games, and it’s changing everything: work, play, communication, lifestyle.
But, even though all this great stuff is happening, we still have serious challenges ahead of us.
Some of you may be familiar with a talk Unity’s CEO, John Riccitiello, gave back in 2016, cautioning our young industry against being too optimistic — known as his “gap of disappointment” talk. We tend to think that adoption is a steady but linear growth, while in fact it typically takes on exponential form. The difference between our expectation and the reality is the gap of disappointment, i.e. the blue area in this chart.
It’s 2017, and you are here.
The gap of disappointment is real, and we’re in it. Ultimately it will be fairly meaningless, because this is a once-in-a-generation new tech that is so compelling that it changes everything.
But that may be small consolation if you’re feeling it now as a VR developer. Maybe you’ve seen the articles lamenting VR’s demise in the trade press, because headset adoption is slower than some of the market analyst predictions. Maybe you’ve even felt it personally in your fundraising activities. No doubt, it’s starting to feel like VR is slowing down.
Riccitiello more recently laid out what he thinks it’s going to take, specifically, to bridge the gap to mass adoption of XR, namely: we need to have a device that costs under a thousand dollars, and we need to have hundreds of millions of them. VR is nowhere near that yet. While costs are quickly dropping, we are only at around 10 million units.
ARKit and ARCore, on the other hand, get us to that mass scale in one stroke with around half a billion units expected to hit the market next year.
Scale problem, solved.
With all this, from everything I am hearing, companies that were heavily in VR are now moving into phone-based AR, and there are a slew of new startups and ventures funds focused on AR… all attracted by the lure of scale. The release of ARKit changed everything. And like it or not, it will probably divert a fair amount attention from VR for the next little while.
But while phone-based augmented reality is here, now, convenient, and in your pocket, there is still nothing to replace the complete immersion of virtual reality for some experiences. The pendulum may swing to AR for a while, but there are so many great use cases for VR that I believe it will have its day again.
Meanwhile, nobody is standing still with VR or AR. The big hardware, software and service providers, and the entertainment brands and corporations deploying content, are fully committed to seeing this vision through. They’re still making massive investments, and taking the long view.
I guess what I’m saying is: it’s all good.
The Future’s So Bright…
So…. Where is this all going?
I think that many of us imagine someday a convergent device: one platform, or maybe two, that do VR, AR, MR, all the R’s… with room scale, positional tracking, mobility, and the ability to move seamlessly between an augmented real-world experience and a fully immersive virtual one.
This future interface could look something like the one in the Iron Man movies. Or in Minority Report. Or, god forbid, that commercially spammy MR hellscape that Teichi Matsuda envisioned in his concept film “Hyper-reality.”
Or maybe it will be something completely different than any of us imagine. But I think we’re all aspiring to a new way of interacting with information and entertainment content, that puts it all around us, where and when we need and want it. Such a universal device may even be one of the requirements for mainstream acceptance — as AR consumers tire of waving their phones around, and VR users finally get fed up with the big bucket on their head and the tether.
But this is going to take a while.
Meantime, how do we bridge the Gap of Disappointment?
We have to build the right stuff.
Partially, we’ll get there via industrial applications — that is, get paid to build things instead of building them for free and hoping somebody buys them, or watches ads. Earlier generations of VR survived in exactly this way for decades by selling to industry and the military. On the AR side, companies like Vuforia were built on an industrial business, solving real customer problems. It was only the last few years that serious consumer and brand applications were built with Vuforia, as interest in AR grew.
We will start to see breakout AR consumer apps, but this is going to take time. ARKit will help with the numbers, but we also have this small problem with AR: nobody knows how to build for it yet. There’s a lot of experimentation going on, but not a lot of understanding about good UX design and the vocabulary of how present information, given the integration between the real and virtual. It’s arguably a few years behind VR on this score. Yes, we’re going to see some cool stuff, like Snapchat’s 3D emojis, and now we’re seeing a new generation of consumer AR startups with names like Skrite, Mirage, Fyusion. Are these the killer AR apps and platforms? Could be…
Meanwhile, VR content just keeps getting better and better. We’ve have had a few big hits like Job Simulator, but it’s still on a small user base. I was recently fortunate enough to be at Kaleidoscope’s First Look event and saw world-class new cinematic content, and projects are getting funded. So, if VR developers can hang on a little while longer…
In the end it all comes down to good content. This is such an obvious idea, and so well worn, but it’s worth repeating. It’s easy to say “this new medium needs great content,” but that’s always the case with a new medium. It’s much easier said than done, and pundits like me can safely spout pronouncements all day long. But it’s going to take vision and innovation to get there.
We need to think about design, think about taking full advantage of these amazing new capabilities, not just immersion but location, accelerometer, gesture input, sound, the camera, the environment around us. We need to envision 1) what this future will look like, 2) what gets built to make that future come to pass, and 3) own our role in it.
I wish I had the answers as to what those future visions might be. I’m not sure I do. But thankfully I work with a lot of smart people. Here is a look at work that Unity is doing at the Mixed Reality Research Group within Unity Labs, our division tasked with looking into the future– 3 to 5 years, and beyond.
Unity envisions that within the next five years a big leap in display resolution, plus advances in sensor tracking, will push mixed reality towards more constant usage, making it possible for people to start working directly in MR devices for long periods of time. At that point, it’s a lightweight headset or pair of glasses, freeing up your hands and sparing your shoulders and elbows from strain. Once we have this, every object in an environment becomes its own display and its own context for conveying information.
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
As a final thought, I’d like to share what inspired me to get into this field in the first place, over twenty years ago.
In the summer of 1977, I was one of millions of American nerd boys who flocked to see Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. Of its many iconic scenes, one that really stuck with me was the scene where Princess Leia delivered Obi-Wan Kenobi a message of vital importance to the resistance — via a tabletop video hologram. Though George Lucas was telling a story that happened long ago and far, far away to other people, he was really envisioning our future. And as it turned out, it’s not taking that long to become a reality.
To me, this is where it’s headed. The virtual and the real, fully interwoven. Science helping us bring magic into the world, and bringing us to magical worlds. We’re creating the building blocks for the future — the interfaces that could save the planet, monitor and control automation, take us into outer space, and store and present the world’s information. Immersive computing will, without a doubt, be an integral part of any future civilization, in many more ways that George Lucas ever dreamed of.
Let’s keep something like this as our North Star, our guidepost as we run into inevitable detours on the way to VR, AR and MR becoming mainstream.
I think it’ll help.
