7. Barriers to Oculus Rift hitting it big on the consumer market
By Jana French and Jackson Moore-Ragusin
With Oculus Rift now released to developers, much time and energy is being spent creating Virtual Reality experiences, from trips to distant lands to attending a distant family member’s birthday party. However, there are still many issues developers must address before Oculus can hit it big on the consumer market.
Physical Perception Issues/Motion sickness
Imagine you’re on a dive through the ocean (virtually, obviously), but you can’t see your arms in front of you as you propel your way through the water. The pressure you’d typically feel from being x number of feet under the surface just isn’t there. You suddenly feel like you have the ability to breathe underwater. In fact, you’re not even getting wet. Also, you seem to be standing up. Suddenly, someone calls out from the other side of the room to tell you you’re about to hit the wall. You snap back to the reality of where you actually are and realize you need to make a quick trip to the bathroom.
It’s been said that the Oculus Rift has hacked the human AV system and may make us better humans, but it’s tough to reason how these changes will affect the average user. Many people report experiencing motion sickness. The BBC attributes this to the lag time between head movement and graphic changes.
Motion sickness has been the biggest barrier to the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality technologies hitting the consumer market — so big, in fact, that Sony warned Oculus to fix the problem before releasing their product to consumers.
However, solutions to this nauseating problem don’t seem to be very far off. One new tracking technology, Lighthouse, claims to completely eradicate the problem of motion sickness.
The ACME Corporation has been as secretive as usual with respect to their complicated system of levers, pulleys, and dynamite.
Regardless, physical barriers other than motion sickness stand between the Rift and the consumer market.
Designers of virtual reality experiences need to consider natural instincts and how that could limit the risks people are willing to take even in a virtual reality, like a Fortune journalist’s experience with trying to jump off of a virtual skyscraper.
Some people wear glasses, so models of the technology need to work with them or find a way to calibrate with the eye so it doesn’t need the lens to make using an Oculus more convenient.
Users have to be tethered to a computer in order to use the Oculus Rift. So, the first and most obvious issue is that the Oculus can’t be used outside of the everyday user’s living room.
And even if you could take it outside, the battery life would have to be extremely long. Another Virtual Reality product set to hit the market is Gear VR, which uses your smartphone for a screen. But one half-hour session with the Gear VR takes about 15 to 20 percent of the Samsung Note 4’s battery life — a large enough portion of your battery that you’d need to charge it before the day ended.
Still, it’s a virtual reality product. Is there really a need to experience virtual reality in any specific part of actual reality? Well… sort of — it depends on whether or not you want to immerse yourself in a virtual world with less than or equal to the square footage of your own home, or if you wanted to use the device for anything other than entertainment, such as meetings and overseeing projects from a distance.
Social barriers
Virtual reality offers a whole new type of communication for the consumer. One writer talked about how using an Oculus Rift can allow family members to attend important life events virtually, and not just from the perspective of a laptop Skype session.
But what if you and your significant other want to go to your niece’s birthday party across the country? Will you each need to put on separate Oculus Rifts as you sit next to each other on the couch? Will you be able to see each other at the party? And who will sit in the room with the both of you to make sure no one runs into a wall?
In addition to some of the physical and logistical barriers to Oculus Rift hitting it big on the consumer market, there are some pretty serious social barriers as well. As it stands, the Oculus Rift is a mostly single-player experience — as it turns out, strapping a giant pair of binoculars to your face and closing yourself off to the physical world around you doesn’t lend itself to creating and maintaining relationships.
Virtual reality does not necessarily have to be a solipsistic nightmare for everyone involved; in fact, with the potential to mimic real-life interaction over long distances, it could bring people together. Before that can happen, however, something needs to be done about the social aspects of VR.
As of right now, the Rift and other mainstream VR technology are mostly visual experiences, and until other senses are brought into the fold, the user will remain more of an observer than a participant. Basically, the key to overcoming the Rift’s social barriers is to create a more multifaceted and realistic simulation of our world that lets users interact inside of it.
