Does looking too far into VR’s future hurt its progress now?
Being at the OC3 conference this year reminded me of my first day of college.
I’ll never forget when a classmate approached me to bluntly ask who my favourite superhero was. “Um, I guess Batman,” I said. Without even the slightest pause, he immediately said, “Mine is Hulk.” Normally this would be a super weird exchange between strangers. But in that moment, I realized I was in a place surrounded by people like me. I had that same feeling at OC3.
But as invigorating as it is to be amongst the pioneers of an industry and a part of the excitement of things to come, this year, much if not all of this inspiration was future-facing. The excitement about things TO COME rather than innovations that are ready now. Granted, with Oculus Connect only being three years old, this edition had a lot to live up to.
The first one was pure buzz. The core hardware was changing lives, Facebook had validated the industry with a huge investment, and everyone was ready to invent the future. The second OC was equally as exciting with the announcements of many new hardware and software innovations. We watched Henry, dove into Medium, played Bullet Train, and most mind blowing of all, experienced the brand new touch controls in the Toybox demo. Interacting with my own hands in VR with another live human was an experience I will never forget. It changed my life, and has influenced and inspired my own innovations in VR for the past year.
As always, Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash’s future talk was on point. Even though he was sick as a dog, he still gave us just the right dose of foresight to inspire our future concepts. As a futurist in training, I really appreciate his visions and practicality. Oculus’ John Carmack ended the conference with an amazing state of the nation, without taking a single breath or a drink of water. I wish he could end every OC conference, and just have the mic until he’s done — likely 4 or 5 hours — It’ll be like a Phish concert for tech nerds.
But this year, I didn’t leave OC3 with quite the same excitement as years past. I’m inspired by the potential of SocialVR, WebVR, Inside Out Tracking, and Avatars, as well as a number of grants, funds, and initiative announcements like Oculus Next Gen and VR for Good. But the biggest tangible takeaway from this year’s conference was the verified shipping date for Touch — something we all knew was coming anyway. Otherwise, we were teased with some “exciting things Oculus has been working on,” but we took away few insights beyond this.
Now don’t get me wrong — Oculus is doing amazing work, and are leading this emerging industry. They treat their developers very well, and have put a huge amount of resources and intelligence into their hardware and content ecosystems. But I feel like they were gun shy at OC3 to really demonstrate their dominance.
Mark Zuckerberg’s demo indeed gave us a glimpse of the future. We saw avatars capable of expression and live interactions, seamless integration of people and environments both real and virtual, and the power of social content consumption throughout. There was even a seemingly ultra-elegant Facebook post from within the virtual world onto the social network. But where were the tangible demonstrations? What is this tech actually doing, and how might we be able to use it? I really wanted to see the face tracking tech, the magic watches they were wearing, the FB post from within VR actually posting to Facebook. I’m no stranger to the “proof of concept,” but it felt like there could have been any number of ways this demo was achieved, and we didn’t have any glimpse behind the curtain.
I wish Oculus would rediscover their confidence to show their dominance. Show us the tech! Give us an idea of what it’s made of and how it works, so that we can anticipate how to invent the future with it! I recognize the risk of transparency in a fast moving industry. And I’m sure there’s a fine line that I’m not addressing here. But if the public demonstration of half-baked tech puts you at risk of being copied and surpassed by your competitors, then you’re not showing enough confidence as the dominant player, and you’re leaving your developers guessing for another year.
