Who will do for VR what Beats did for over-the-ear headphones?

The Information had a great post yesterday about the different ways in which Google and Facebook view the opportunity in Virtual Reality:

Google leaders including CEO Sundar Pichai and Clay Bavor, who heads a newly formed VR unit at Google, have privately said that augmented, or “mixed,” reality, in which digital information and images are overlaid or next to a person’s view of the real world, is going to be a much bigger market than VR in the long run, according to several people at the company and elsewhere. (Think “Terminator” vision.)

THIS BELIEF STEMS PARTLY FROM THE NOTION THAT PEOPLE WON’T WEAR VR GOGGLES IN PUBLIC. Thus, the thinking goes, the replacement to the smartphone will be devices enabling mixed reality that people can use anytime, including while on the go.

Google’s vision stands in contrast with that of archrival Facebook. At the heart of VR is human interaction — Facebook’s forte, not Google’s. For people working at Facebook’s Oculus unit, their version of the Bible is a science fiction novel called “Ready Player One,” a vision of a dystopian future in which most of humanity logs into a virtual reality system called “Oasis” that is controlled by one company. In it, children go to virtual school using avatars and names of their choosing, and anyone with enough virtual currency can travel to thousands of fully-formed virtual worlds to meet and interact with other people.

(ALLCAPS mine). Everyone is a prisoner of their own experience, and Google’s view on whether people will wear VR Goggles in public is no doubt rooted in their “Glassholes” experience.

I buy the “Ready Player One” vision of the far future. I also share Google’s questions about how we get from here to there. Almost all of the current VR apps are best suited for immersive, long-form experiences; games, movies, even video conferencing. For these application,s a stationary, private use of VR goggles is ideal. But now that we’ve gotten used to our smartphones being with us all the time, we really do need the next compute platform to be with us always, whether in public or private, and accessible both for long form immersive experiences and to dip in and out.

This is where looking at what Beats by Dre did for over-the-ear headphones is so instructive. This category that was basically dead to the general public. The ear bud had been the dominant headphone form factor for many years. Over the-ear headphones just looked weird.

Beats brought back the over-the-ear headphone by putting them on the heads of people that inspired others. The early adopters were musicians, actors, celebrities, heck, just cool looking kids. They gave the general public “permission” to wear Beats, because if the cool kids are doing it, it’s OK for me to be a little funny looking too.

Today, VR is not taking this approach. They are targeting gamers as their early adopters. Ask your inner middle schooler — which of these two people do you aspire to be?

This seems like a very solveable problem.

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