A hundred hats for a hundred headsets
I don’t really have the hair for hats. It’s large, curly, and can exhibit a Ms. Frizzle-level of frizz. And leading product development at a startup in the immersive reality industry requires one to wear an absurd number of literal and figurative hats. It’s a product of the diversification (or rather fragmentation) of the market. Just about every big company has invested in their own Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality or “Insert Name of ® Reality” Reality headset, and has pushed it into the market with the expectation that developers will adapt.
The industry itself though is pretty clueless. Not in the sense that it’s not intelligent or aware, but more literally that we don’t know what is going to work. Every headset developer says that their new product is THE product: the Tetris, the iPhone, the sliced bread. So if you don’t develop for them all, you’re liable to miss out on buttering that sweet sweet toast. The problem that this creates though is that as a startup, where you barely have enough resources to make bread, you either end up spreading yourself really thin and developing for every device, or you put all your eggs in one headset and hope it doesn’t get crushed… with all of your eggs in it.
In the last five years, I’ve developed for just about every headset the industry has thrown at us: the Rift, Vive, Daydream, Hololens, Gear, PSVR, WMR … Cardboard, and on and on. While to some extent their codebases can be unified with Unity, they all require customization, have different input methods, need native code written for optimization, and provide a different enough user experience to require a unique design. And being part of a media company, there is also the problem of supporting all the new (and old) types of media being created for these headsets. From traditional fixed frame photos and movies in a virtual theater, to 180, 220, 270, 360 degree spheres of static or interactive videos, with 2-channel, 4-channel, 8-channel, ambisonic, directional audio, to fully motion-captured holographic playback.
If you couldn’t tell, our strategy was to butter all the bread. At the peak, I was working simultaneously with six different headsets and totally immersed for three hours a day. And it’s easy to lose sight of reality spending so much time behind a screen. Add that to just general phone or computer time, that’s about twelve hours a day immersed in a world that we often perceive as a reflection of reality. All-encompassing, adrenaline and endorphin-filled, enabling us to escape or embody, and generally taking us away from the physical reality of the world. It’s easy to forget what boredom feels like when you can saturate your senses with stimuli. Couple that with managing a team, answering customer support, and helping design UX, it was easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of both the industry and life in general.
It turned out actually that most of the industry’s strategy was the same. Everyone spread themselves so thin that it resulted in fewer and worse quality experiences being generated, which meant that there wasn’t enough to keep consumers engaged with their headsets, so fewer headsets were purchased, and thus fewer companies could be funded to create experiences, which spiraled into effectively killing the latest excitement and momentum of the immersive industry as a whole. In 2015 and 2016 the industry hit its peak, then fell into a brutal winter, and those that have survived the cold are either because of big pockets, frugality, or dumb luck.
And so looking up from all of this, I see an industry that was so immersed in its own virtual reality that it lost sight of what was going on in the world. AR and VR and XR will certainly have a place in this world, and companies will continue to try and build the next revolutionary toast, but for the most part, I’d like to think that the industry has started to sober up with a realistic understanding that it needs to work together to make a change.
For me, I’ve stepped back a bit from the screen. I’ve prioritized more balance in my life by reconnecting with the natural world (as it needs a lot of our attention right now), garnering a healthier focus on my physicality, and investing in relationships with the people I love. The exploration of natural reality, after all, is why I love immersive reality. And results in less frizzy hair.
