It’s A Little Early For The Trough Of Disillusionment
The case for the long view, or, a small pep talk
It’s January of a new year, so it’s inevitable that if you work in tech you’re going to get subjected to a deluge of previews about the state of the industry. I’m not going to add to it with yet another one, but I’m already seeing sour notes creep into them as people express disappointment with adoption rates, headset sales, etc. and the usual backlash to things that get a lot of hype then don’t change everyone’s entire life immediately.
I don’t think anyone should ignore data that indicates that some aspects of VR are developing more slowly than we’d all like. But I’d also advocate for taking the long view, which is that VR is not a short-term proposition, while simultaneously understanding where outside skepticism is warranted and where it isn’t.
Yes, we do see some VR companies and studios that are being funded as if they’re going to generate returns in 12 to 18 months (and some pure studios that are being funded as if they’re software companies, and some general stupidity) and if those really are the expectations, there are some investors and entrepreneurs who are going to be disappointed. But this is a reminder about the long game: nearly everyone I know who is working in VR right now (and I’m going to use VR loosely as a catch-all for all modified R tech) got into VR because they did something immersive and could easily imagine the ways in which sophisticated VR would revolutionize the way we interact with each other, communicate, and experience both real and simulated realities.
I don’t know a single person who’s serious about VR because they think of it as really awesome high-end gamer tech (even though it is, among other things, really awesome high-end gamer tech). It is much more than that.
And it’s useful to remember that the promise of VR is not always apparent to people who work outside of the industry and are not VR enthusiasts. Personally, I think the most accessible forms of VR on the market right now might also undermine consumer adoption for a while.
Nearly everyone I know working in VR right now got into VR because they did something immersive and could easily imagine how sophisticated VR would revolutionize the way we interact.
I agree with Robert Scoble here when he says that mobile VR generally sucks because there’s no inside-out tracking, there are heat problems, and GPUs aren’t there yet — and increasingly I don’t like it as a gateway to other types of VR because the difference between even the best of mobile VR and, say, a roomscale experience, is such an epic gulf in terms of immersion that they don’t feel like two points on a continuum. (I often tell people who’ve only done mobile VR to try something immersive because the difference is the difference between a newspaper comic and a Pixar movie. This backfires on me when they hate Pixar, but you get the idea.)
If the only VR experience you’ve ever had was using an overheated phone in a Gear VR/knockoff/Google Cardboard and it made you feel woozy, you’re probably not going to extrapolate from it that VR will eventually obviate the need for physical screens, change the way we consume every form of entertainment, disrupt the travel industry, and enable a whole new class of cheap and widely available experiential education tools. You can’t really blame anyone for ambivalence if that’s their entry point.
But longer term it doesn’t matter, because the entry points will change. GPUs are getting better and cheaper. The future of VR and AI are intertwined, and AI-assisted authoring is already making it easier to create VR experiences. Headsets are getting lighter, less clunky, easier to use, and sooner rather than later, we’ll be able to do roomscale VR untethered without looking like we have a shoebox strapped to our face. Social VR (which is, I still assume, the entire reason why Facebook acquired Oculus) will generate wider demand as the social experiences become more accessible and are built into existing networks. These things are all happening, or beginning to happen now.
If the only VR experience you’ve ever had was using an overheated phone in a Gear VR/knockoff/Google Cardboard and it made you feel woozy, you’re probably not going to extrapolate from it that VR will eventually obviate the need for physical screens, change the way we consume every form of entertainment, disrupt the travel industry, and enable a whole new class of cheap and widely available experiential education tools. You can’t really blame anyone for ambivalence if that’s their entry point.
At some point, if we project forward even further, a great MR experience will be accomplished via some piece of consumer tech that’s virtually invisible: it’s a contact lens, or it looks like a generic pair of glasses. And this is not some flying car/Jetsons fantasy, these things are already in development. But it’s whatever Magic Leap (or Apple, or Microsoft, or Meta or…) is producing in five or seven or ten years; not what you’re going to see in Q3.
It’s also a bit of a fallacy to talk about “VR” as some sort of monolith technologically, given that it’s used as shorthand for everything that might be utilized in a VR experience — from HMDs to haptic peripherals to content to software to miscellaneous hardware — each of which are developing at varied paces, some of them faster and some of them slower than anticipated. When our not-very-technically-literate and micro-digited president-elect recently referred to the current state of technology and cybersecurity as “the whole age of computer,” I felt only slightly more pain than I do when people point to a tiny piece of VR as a barometer for everything else that fits, however loosely, into the category. There’s only a “whole age of VR” if you’re building a widely diversified portfolio of VR-related companies. Otherwise, VR is a complex ecosystem and it’s important to avoid cherrypicking companies or products as proxies for its overall health.
So this is a call for patience, and a plea for VR prognosticators to consider realistic timelines, what the endgame really is, and make sure they’re using the right comparables to assess success or failure. And if you’re working in the industry, consider it a prompt to remember why you got into VR in the first place and what made it exciting for you.
