I guess we're already at the circling the wagons part of VR's failure to launch.
Since this year’s CES, many in the tech community were talking about how VR needs its killer app... a reason for its existence, or it will disappear. As Ian Bell, CEO of Digital Trends said in a recent DigiDay article, “We see technologies that are always on the precipice, but if they don’t hurry and add intrinsic value, the consumer is going to move on. VR is in that space. People right now look at it and say it’s cool but it’s also kind of gimmicky. Unless someone steps up and makes VR relevant, people will move on.”
To an extent, I agree that VR definitely needs to improve in all areas - both in terms of software and hardware ― to reach mass adoption. What I don’t agree with is that that VR is going to be left for dead unless someone “makes it relevant soon.”
VR doesn’t need a killer app to succeed. VR itself is a killer app. VR is a medium.
He goes on to say that books didn't become successful because someone wrote one really popular book, and that 3DTV was a feature of a medium, and not a medium itself, and that's why VR will be successful. His entire argument for why VR will inevitably succeed boils down to people being willing to buy into VR in ever-increasing numbers, in spite of its unsolved issues and lack of any practical applications:
VR has already more than doubled its user base every year since Oculus was founded, and if that trend continues, which I think is likely, it will still be 4-5 years before VR has 100 million users. By that point, VR will be a big and mature enough platform to really take off, where you have a large user base buying content to fund the creation of some seriously awesome content. It will take at least another 4-5 years after that to reach a billion users, and by that point will be a major computing platform. So, within a decade it’s fairly reasonable to think that VR could have a billion users.
So says the Head of VR at
Virtualise, a VR production studio -- who, incidentally, never once mentions his own conflict of interest here, namely that he's advocating for continued consumer adoption of a platform that will benefit his firm, without once mentioning how it will benefit consumers themselves.
So, let's break down the problems with this self-serving, pie-in-the-sky argument.
Describing VR as a medium comparable to books is ridiculous.
Books were nothing more than a feature of the written word, adding portability to a medium which was otherwise somewhat cumbersome. And even books didn't become the widespread transformative technology that they ultimately grew into until the printing press made them affordable to everybody.
Also, books
did have a "killer app," a single book that helped spur their widespread adoption throughout Western civilization: you may have heard of the
Bible? Still the single
best-selling book of all time?
The book
had a killer app,
and was an evolution of a technology thousands of years old, and
still needed the printing press to come along, transforming the written word into the printed word, before it could become the powerful force that we recognize from the last couple of hundred years. It took decades for television supplant the printed word as our dominant medium of communication, and decades more for the internet to take TV's place. To say that VR will accomplish that same feat of cultural colonization in 10 years or less stretches credulity to the breaking point.
Saying that VR enables one to convey experiences that can't be conveyed via any other medium is also ridiculous.
The big problem that VR faces right now is that it doesn't do this. At all. When people say that VR needs a "killer app," they don't mean that it needs one single piece of software that will sell the platform; they mean that someone needs to figure out what VR is good for, and that can't be done outside of VR.
What unique experience does VR provide, that people will want to experience in large enough numbers to drive adoption? Right now, nobody can answer this question; instead, VR's proponents keep talking about how we can't imagine all the future uses for the technology... which is another way of saying that there aren't any current uses for the tech.
When the first true smartphone hit the market, nobody knew just how useful the device would ultimately be, or how widely it would be adopted... but everyone knew it could make phone calls. In addition to its unknown future potential, the smartphone also had immediate utility; all the other uses that people found for the smartphone just added value to a device which already had value. Add in the economies of scale which come with widespread adoption, and smartphones are now everywhere. I know that the makers of VR hardware and content would love for their shiny new thing to take off in the same way, but the simple reality is that VR doesn't offer anything of value, out of the box, that people can't already do without it. Until that changes, VR is not a must-have; it's a gimmick.
VR's user base is tiny, and doubling such a tiny number is not nearly as large a feat as achieving widespread adoption will be.
Basically, Oculus went from being dev kits in the hands of only the earliest backers, to being basically-finished products in the hands of slightly later backers, to being that same product in the hands of only early adopters... which is where its user base growth seems to have stalled.
We might well see linear growth in the size of VR's user base, but exponential growth will only happen if the growth we've already seen is enough to spur even faster growth, which then spurs even faster growth. So far, that's not happening. Unless VR can present a compelling value proposition to consumers, it simply won't double the size of its consumer user base every year... and without consumer growth, any other growth in VR's user base will also be stalled.
VR can achieve a value proposition by solving VR's many issues (e.g. simulation sickness, or traversal of virtual spaces, or interaction with virtual objects), finding a reason for VR to exist in the first place, and/or reducing VR's cost significantly, but some combination of those factors must happen before VR's user base will increase significantly in size, and all of them will have to happen before it gets anywhere near a billion users.
Right now, VR is the new 3DTV, and consumers have already shown that they're not going to drop hundreds of dollars on a basically-useless display device that's unpleasant to use when it's not gathering dust on a shelf, let alone thousands. To speak of billions of users, without providing some sort of concrete road map to that milestone, really is just so much noise.
McMaster continues his "think" piece with this canard:
I could be wrong, the adoption rate could be slower if the experiences aren’t good enough, or the hardware isn’t affordable and accessible. However, the adoption rate will always keep continuing on an upward trend as long as the hardware is being produced.
Really?
Why? Why is that
exactly? Apart from the fact that Mr. McMaster would find it awfully convenient (and profitable),
why does the adoption rate have to keep increasing, in spite of the tech being fundamentally useless, in addition to being expensive and unpleasant to use? Because I'm not seeing a reason for that to happen, or for companies to be willing to continue to produce the hardware itself, if widespread adoption doesn't start to happen relatively soon.
I'd say that the lack of "good enough" experiences on display at CES were the reason that many in the tech community are starting to have doubts about VR's inevitability. I'd say that the dearth of affordable, accessible hardware is already hurting adoption. Even PlayStation VR, the most affordable, accessible hardware on the market, with the largest library of available experiences, isn't taking off the way it was expected to. Why does any of this have to trend upwards, rather than petering out as the (publicly-traded) corporations that are required to drive it into the mainstream face ever-increasing pressure from their shareholders to show
actual results, dropping out of the VR market if/when those results fail to materialize?
McMaster closes his piece with this gem:
And while the consumer market grows over the next few years, the market for VR across industries including health, education, medicine and construction could provide even more potential to the success of the industry. As an example, the use of VR in cognitive behaviour therapy to treat patients with social anxieties or phobias is already proving its worth, and with the biggest tech companies on earth all still firmly committed to VR, things will only keep getting better.
The word McMaster should be reaching for, here, is not so much "while," as "if."
If the consumer market grows over the next few years,
if applications for VR are found across health, education, and construction,
if those currently-vaporous applications can provide more potential success for industries....
if,
if,
if. Lots of things
could happen; that's very different from saying that they're
certain to happen, or even
likely to happen.
Also, considering how recent a development VR is, to say that any VR-based therapy's worth is "proven" is nonsense. Early results might be promising, but a lot more data will need to be gathered on the effectiveness of those therapies before anything can be said to be "proven" in any statistically significant sense.
Early results can be extremely misleading.
Also, the listing of both health and medicine as separate industries that could potentially benefit from VR is telling, here, because most would consider those to be the same industry; listing them separately feels like an attempt to pad out a list that would otherwise be pretty fucking threadbare. You might as well list both construction and architecture; in fact, it would be more honest to simply list architecture, since VR isn't being used in any actual construction process that I'm aware of; even architects are only using it for virtual walk-throughs of the sort that they've being doing outside of VR for years.
If the world's largest tech companies remain committed to VR, then it's possible that they could solve a lot of VR's issues.
But remaining committed to VR means a willingness to continue spending billions of dollars, annually, on research and development, while seeing adoption plateau, knowing that adoption will only improve in the technology's next generation, with any profits from VR being farther off still. These are all publicly-traded companies, remember.
Yes, Facebook have a lot of cash on hand, and can afford to lose money on VR for years, but how long will their shareholders be willing to wait for Facebook's multi-billion-dollar bet on Oculus to start paying dividends? Especially when all of 2016 was wall-to-wall hype about how 2016 was going to be the year of VR? After the year of VR that wasn't, actually, how many more years will Facebook be able to keep dumping money down the black hole of VR before their shareholders revolt?
I'm not saying that VR can't become a thing, eventually, or that it won't ever become a thing, eventually. But even McMaster's piece is now talking in terms of 5- and 10-year timeframes, which is a huge step back from the VR evangelists' claims that VR was going to become a thing last year; they're not even claiming that 2017 will be the year of VR, having been burned by 2016. And saying that VR won't really become a thing for another 5 years, or ten years, is the same as saying that it won't be the current generation of the tech that becomes a thing. It might be that the next generation of VR devices will catch fire, or maybe the one after that, but it won't be this one.
Save your money, and your time.
Wait until the VR's proponents can tell you what the tech will be useful for today, rather than just telling you that it will be useful for who-knows-what applications down the road, once all the bugs are worked out. Early adopters may have money to burn, and a willingness to pay a premium to be glorified beta-testers, but you shouldn't be. If VR can only become a thing if a billion people are willing to spend way more than it's currently worth in order to create a user base large enough for it to be worth the while of huge corporations like Facebook to continue investing in the tech, then maybe it deserves to wither on the vine.
