The $200 Star Wars headset is a sign of things to come.
Disney’s making a big bet on their $200 headsets, and learning an immense amount about the market.

Lover’s of franchises like Star Wars can spend all of their virtual hours within a single universe.
VR users will hop from experience to experience just as we do today with TV, games, and movies. Some users will settle on a singular virtual world to spend their time in. Disney is laying the foundations of this today by introducing hardware and software for one of the most popular franchises in the world.
How many World of Warcraft players would buy a VR rig meant for a VR World of Warcraft? If dedicated WoW players spend >$1000 every few years to upgrade their computers, upgrading to VR will be no stretch.
There is a land grab for VR users.
Companies are betting they can capture a portion of the population of VR users for the long term. Existing franchises like Disney can use their fan base to bring people to the VR platform. Once inside VR, the franchise has a captive audience of dedicated users.
Disney will discover if it is possible for large companies to play the hardware game.
Vive and Oculus appear to be the big players in hardware, with Sony proving they can capture their existing users into a new ecosystem. There may yet still be room for multiple hardware providers, perhaps even franchise specific hardware.
Depending on the level of haptic, visual, and physical feedback required to make their VR games compelling, large companies may choose to develop their own hardware.
Disney will be recording user data from their Star Wars headsets.
From this data Disney can learn how to build their own hardware, or how to utilize existing hardware to make software more usable. Their $200 headsets could be used to bring non-VR users to VR, so that Disney would see more users on their VR experiences on other existing platforms.
The $200 headsets are a bet that Disney can play the hardware game alongside Facebook and HTC.
Some users will spend a majority of their virtual hours within singular universes from exiting franchises. But does this mean franchise specific hardware will sell?
If Vive and Oculus live up to their 2nd gen claims it will be challenging for others to compete in the hardware game. The amount of features available on these existing platforms justify creating software for instead of creating standalone hardware.
For anyone interested in the VR industry, the coming year will be filled with valuable insights as to which hardware platforms are likely to make the long haul.
What about non-entertainment VR hardware?
Hardware companies aiming to make VR hardware for non-gaming specific purposes be wary. VR consumers will use their at home VR headsets to develop clever real world applications, akin to smartphone applications. The headsets with the most users can win whether their initial applications were for entertainment or not.
Is Disney capable of producing VR hardware?
If you’ve kept up with Disney's innovations in VR, or ever visited Disney Quest, you might bet that Disney is more than capable of producing VR hardware of the same or better quality than HTC or Facebook. It’s time to watch the market react to a $200 Star Wars headset.
This is post 42 of my 90 VR experiment. Join me here for a daily dose of virtual reality design, gameplay, speculation, and adventure.

