Virtual Reality won’t save the mobile industry — yet
Boot up, Strap In, Zone Out
Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016, the mobile industry’s yearly jamboree in Barcelona for all that’s shiny and new, has delivered a few precious nuggets of genuine innovation and the usual slew of pretty landfill.
As it stumbled through its final day of exhausted techperbole (“Mobile is Everything!”), the major brands were able to simultaneously show us how they’ve run out of ideas, are tentatively trying a few new ones and are waiting for the next big thing — nicely summing up the confused state of the mobile industry.
In some respects, this year’s gathering couldn’t come at a more important time: smartphone sales are slowing down, causing pain across the industry, tablet sales have crashed and wearables haven’t taken off with the predicted speed. The mobile world is in bad need of some hope and change.
Mobile World Congress has traditions to respect: goody bags ready to equip us for a post-apocalypse world where pens, lanyards and USB sticks are the essential tools of survival is one; OEMs launching new flagship devices is another. But MWC wouldn’t be MWC without Samsung and LG diva-ing it out with each other and on this year’s showing, Samsung may be throwing Cava glasses at the dressing room wall.
Samsung dutifully rolled out the obligatory flagship products, the S7 Galaxy and Edge, proving once again that in the mobile industry, you can fit a gallon into a pint pot. The S7 claims it’s waterproof, has a monster 3,000mAh battery and a DSLR-like camera focusing mechanism that does something very fancy with 12m megapixels, letting in 25 percent more light and…. well, it wasn’t that exciting.
LG got people to sit up a little straighter with their unibody modular phone, the G5. It looks like a single aluminium body shell, but you can remove the base of the device and plug in modular items, such as the LG Cam Plus (a dedicated module with extra camera controls) and LG Hi-Fi Plus (essentially a pre-amp unit done in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen). It also has two cameras on the back, including an ultra wide angle 135-degree lens, that can combine to produce layering effects.
LG placed a big emphasis on boot-up times, which is unsurprising because the use cases f0r the Cam Plus are likely to be fairly spontaneous. There are those who will have it plugged in all the time as keen photographers, but for the rest of the world, by the time you’ve switched the device off, removed the base, fumbled in your bag for the Cam Plus, put the first one away, plugged in the new one, the moment’s probably gone.
It would be unlikely for LG to be the only ones giving modularity a go, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the size of investment this represents. Changes to devices’ electrical and mechanical architecture this big will need time to be amortised, so it’s unlikely this is a“one and out” for LG. The financial deal that it has cut with its partners like Bang & Olufsen will be critical.
Trying to create a flagship smartphone is an expensive, resource-crushing, thankless task — just ask HTC. Yet, with over 80m units with an individual price above $600 being sold in the US alone last year, the sheer size of the premium smartphone category continues to draw moths to the flame, despite Apple’s near total dominance of that price band.
Other brands, like Xiaomi, couldn’t give a hoot about it. Given their key markets have been India and China, their goal is to attack the price points much lower down. Their Mi 5, as The Verge put it, has “an overwhelming spec sheet” and with a price tag of $350 that’s so good it’s suspicious, you’d want to check someone hadn’t nicked your keys whilst you were distracted by it. And speaking of lifting things, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s VP, claimed with a straight face that he wants Xiaomi to become known for their own design. Given their previous slavish copying of the iPhone, the Mi 5 partially delivers on this promise by looking like a Samsung device from the front instead.
The belle not yet at the ball has been 5G which is likely to be a meaningful consumer proposition by 2020. With early trials demonstrating some mind-altering download speeds of 3.6Gbps compared to today’s 15Mbps 4G average in the UK, it’s starting to shape people’s thinking. These speeds enable use cases like streaming 4k content which will start to drive screen and battery evolution — and will also influence just how mobile Virtual Reality (VR) can be.
VR and VR headsets were the topic of MWC 2016. Like tablets and wearables a few years back, everyone had something to say, some of it not terribly coherent. HTC had the Vive; LG had the 360 VR; Samsung has the Gear VR; Alcatel has the Idol 4s smartphone that uses its packaging to convert into a VR headset;. And there are so many 360-degree cameras out there for creating VR content, such as NOKIA’s OZO, we might need all the extra dimensions of spacetime theorised by quantum theory to make use of them. Huawei decided that VR was very last year and decided to show off a 2-in-1 Windows 10 MateBook instead. Perhaps they didn’t get the memo.
But it was Facebook and Oculus Rift that stole the show. As delegates sat in the Samsung launch presentation, strapped into their Gear VR headsets, Mark Zuckerberg appeared, deus ex machina, so that when the headsets came off, the Hoodie-d One was standing up on stage. The picture of an upright Mark Zuckerberg striding past the oblivious massed ranks of slack-necked headset-wearing people brought out the very worst of our William Gibson dystopian cyber-nightmares.
Zuckerberg sunnily proclaimed that social media and virtual reality will be a killer combination: “One day soon all of us are going to have the power to broadcast live so all of our friends and family can experience it like they’re right there with us” which, depending on how you feel about your family, is either going to be a mildly trippy experience or a new form of hell.
But therein also lies the challenge and opportunity: making good, immersive, 360 degree, VR content that’s useful is difficult and expensive.
Zuckerberg’s view of what constitutes social interaction is somewhat at odds with the physical process of putting on a headset to isolate them from the physical world around them. And although the headsets are relatively cheap (Oculus Rift is still a cool $600), when one adds in the costs of cameras to capture and software to edit, the bill quickly leaves the average High Street budget, and the everyday use of them is still more than a little hazy. And whilst VR might aim to be the “the ultimate empathy machine”, it’s a long way from matching the richness of meaning from face-to-face communication.
In order to break out of video game ghetto that VR will no doubt do so well in, the cost and ease of tools that capture and process VR content is the key to making this a success; otherwise, it’s just another high tech platform for big brand broadcasting. So until user generated VR content can be captured, edited and distributed with the same ease, spontaneity and price as photos and videos on your current smartphone, VR’s potential will remain the preserve of isolated geeks.
