Comfort in Failure
Recently there was a press event held at the valve offices where Joe Ludwig ( company programmer at Valve ) showed off some of the new hardware that Valve had been working on. This hardware included the new VR controllers and Lighthouses for tracking. During some Q&A time, Gabe Newell said the following —
We think VR is going right, it’s going consistent with our expectations, we’re also pretty comfortable with the idea that it will turn out to be a complete failure, because simply if you’re not trying to do anything that could fail, you’re probably not doing anything interesting at all.
This struck a chord with me. Not because I’m kind of attached to VR ( and all those other emerging technologies under the same umbrella ) but because it echoes some of our thinking at Studio Zero and the conversations that have been had about where WE are going as a company.
We are IN on Virtual Reality. Yes it’s shiny. Yes it’s new and yeah, we’ve heard every single person who believes it to be a fad talk about how its a fad and how its just going to fade away, but still, we kind of think a bit differently. Not only are we in on VR, but we’re in on WebVR — and thats a place where you really question what you’re doing every single day.
Our plan, is that VR grows over the next 5–10 years and we’ll grow with it. During that time, there will be other technologies that will come along and likely look to replace it. AR & MR ( Augmented and Mixed reality ) will get onto their respective hype cycles before this point and there will be hundreds of articles about them being VR killers.
We think that VR naturally progresses with these technologies and evolves until the point where it’s not needed anymore — and we’re fine with that because we’ve already accepted it. We’re already thinking ahead of where we are working right now, because it would be foolish to think that this is where the web and technology stops — that this is the final transformation, the final medium.
Thats not to say that we are not focused on VR, we can see VR hanging around for at least the next 5 years — right now it’s dodging a few bullets with people comparing it to the short lived 3D TV revolution or saying that its too expensive and not for everyone, but similar things were said about smartphones and maybe most famous of all, the iPhone. Some loved it, some hated it. It was a pretty polarising device for its time. It maybe wasn’t until the 3rd or 4th generation that it became the standard phone for most people.
We’re focused on VR, because we want to do things that are interesting and push ideas further — even into the realms of where they are hard to understand right now.
Shaun is the co-founder and Director of VR at Studio Zero, a Web Studio based in London, UK.
