Denial of Virtual Reality

I spotted this accidental juxtaposition in a Google search for VR news, and it couldn't have been more perfect. First, from RoadToVR:

A Road to VR analysis of the latest data from Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software shows that VR users on Steam have not only been growing, but are at their highest point in history.

First generation VR hardware may not yet have had its mass adoption moment, but pundits claiming the end is near for VR are overlooking strong evidence against their claims. Not only has the tech fostered a strong enthusiast community, but that group continues to grow. In fact, in November there were more VR users on Steam than ever before.

And then, from The VR Soldier:

Although there are still four weeks in the year 2018, VR-related forecasts are not looking great. Research by CCS Insight confirms there will be a total of eight million headsets to be sold throughout 2018. This number combines both VR and AR units, which further confirms the VR industry itself may face a bigger uphill battle than originally assumed.

This total figure is down by 20% compared to 2017. While one would assume sales figures to rise as more content is produced, the opposite is coming true. Further growth will occur in 2019 and beyond, according to the research. CCS Insight confirms 52 million units will be sold in 2022. Whether that favors VR or AR, is difficult to predict at this time.

I couldn't have planned a more perfect rebuttal.

The percentage of VR headset owners increased by 0.05% of Steam's total user base, with only HTC Vive and Oculus Rift showing growth that registered as more than 0.00% on the Steam Hardware Survey. Multiplied by Steam's 125 million users, that's about 62,500 headsets sold... in November, which is one of the two busiest sales months of the year.

Even Black Friday couldn't shift VR's market momentum.

The 0.78% of Steam's total users who have VR or AR headsets, by the by, similarly approximate to 975K total headsets, worldwide, since VR's launch two years ago, and to get even that high, you have to include Oculus Rift's two developer kits, which are almost certainly not in the hands of average consumers. Which must mean that the "eight million headsets" cited by The VR Soldier includes non-SteamVR users, also, like PlayStationVR, GearVR, and, presumably, Google Cardboard.

That's not enough to support any platform, and VR is a platform; headset sales need to pick up sharply, and soon, if this round of either VR or AR hardware is going to be anything other than a footnote in tech history.

Needless to say, I think that's unlikely.

Numbers don't lie: VR is in trouble

Remember back in June, when IDC were predicting that VR headset sales were just about to rebound after plunging by thirty-five percent? Well, here's the thing about that... funny story... it's not happening. At all.

As reported by CinemaBlend:

Virtual Reality gaming is in a unique place. The hardware seems to be doing well, but is that well enough to keep developers interested? According to a recent study, the answer to that question might be no. Over the past six months, it appears VR hardware sales have been on the decline.

The folks over at Thinknum recently conducted a study involving the sale of VR hardware on Amazon. It wasn't a super exhaustive study and pretty much stuck straight to the figures, but you can't really argue that those figures aren't on the decline.

The decline is happening across the board, too: sales of PSVR, GearVR, and HTC Vive were all down. Even Oculus Go, which many VR industry advocates were hoping would be a panacea for VR's troubles, a magic-bullet combination of standalone functionality and low price point, is struggling.

Finally, they took a look at the Oculus Go sales rankings, which have been on a decline since May. As one of the folks in the comments points out, there's no mention of the cheaper core Oculus system, which seems like another odd choice. The Go was a top-item on Amazon in May but, two months later, it's barely in the top 100 items. You can make of that what you will, but the study takes it as a clear sign interest in VR gaming is on the decline.

The declines are not subtle, either, as shown by Thinknum's graphs.

Numbers may not lie, but statistics without context can be incredibly misleading

Consider, for a moment, the state of VR as described by Windows Report:

The Steam Hardware Survey numbers for March 2018 are out and things are not looking good for Microsoft as its Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) fortunes seem to be dwindling.

As you will recall, the WMR headsets have been facing a slow growth in market share, despite the company implementing deep price cuts on the headsets, which initially promised easy setup and support for lower-spec PCs.

Steam’s latest figures place Facebook’s Oculus Rift at the top, with its market share at 50.62 percent, up from 47.31 percent in February this year. This compared to WMR’s share which fell from 5.36 percent to stand at 5.32 percent, while HTC’s Vive also dropped to 44.06 percent from 45.38 percent.

Those statistics, as presented, make it sound like WMR headsets are struggling while Oculus Rift sales are soaring. This is reinforced with this awful graph:

Seriously, this is awful. I could understand sorting in descending order by percentage share, or in alphabetical order, but WTF kind of order is this supposed to be? W, H, O, O, O order? Leader 3rd order?

Would you like to know what the actual numbers are, as presented by the Steam Survey itself?

This week in VR...

... it's Facebook! Because of course it is.

From Business Insider:

As Facebook users around the world are coming to understand, some of their favorite technologies can be used against them. It's not just the scandal over psychological profiling firm Cambridge Analytica getting access to data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles. People's filter bubbles are filled with carefully tailored information — and misinformation — altering their behavior and thinking, and even their votes.

People, both individually and as a society at large, are wrestling to understand how their newsfeeds turned against them. They are coming to realize exactly how carefully controlled Facebook feeds are, with highly tailored ads. That set of problems, though, pales in comparison to those posed by the next technological revolution, which is already underway: virtual reality.

On one hand, virtual worlds hold almost limitless potential. [...] In these new worlds, every leaf, every stone on the virtual ground and every conversation is carefully constructed. In our research into the emerging definition of ethics in virtual reality, my colleagues and I interviewed the developers and early users of virtual reality to understand what risks are coming and how we can reduce them.

"VR is a very personal, intimate situation. When you wear a VR headset … you really believe it, it's really immersive," says one of the developers with whom we spoke. If someone harms you in VR, you're going to feel it, and if someone manipulates you into believing something, it's going to stick. 

As anyone who's read this blog knows, I'm definitely bearish on VR's prospects. I think it's essentially useless, that it's potential is far more limited than VR's proponents think, and that the current generation of VR headsets, including Facebook's, will not become a thing. Yes, if VR were to actually realize the potential that we keep getting told is has, then it could be a powerful tool for manipulating people... which would be troubling if combined with Facebook, which is built from the ground up to psychologically profile and manipulate people. It is Facebook that's the problematic part of that equation, though, and not VR per se.

Added to that, Facebook's shareholders are already unhappy about the billions being dumped into VR with no prospect of anything like profitability for a decade or more. I'm still predicting that Facebook will be writing down or spinning off their Oculus arm within two years, and given how much other trouble they're in, it might happen a lot sooner than that. VR is not, and will not be, a thing; you don't have to work about what Facebook will do with it. Or what anyone will do with it. Because nobody is going to do anything with it.

Which brings us to the other story in VR: HTC's new, better, and more expensive Vive. Yes, more expensive; apparently HTC are still betting their future on VR not only being a thing, but on that thing still having a high end for them to cater to.

"Drawerware"

With VR's two-year anniversary coming up quickly, I've been seeing a lot of videos and articles in the last week analyzing the current state of the industry, and questioning whether VR has, really, any future at all. This article from TechCrunch is a good example:

Compelling virtual reality shipped to developers and consumers nearly two years ago. The first flagship headsets arrived from Oculus and HTC back in the spring of 2016, offering enough resolution, frame rate, field of view, latency mitigation and position-tracking to produce believable visual immersion.

But no one seems to know what to do with it. To date, no killer app has extended the promise of VR from a novelty to a sticky experience or utility that reaches beyond enthusiasts to resonate with the consumer center of mass.

This isn’t to say that great experiences don’t exist. Apps like Tilt Brush, Elite: Dangerous and Google Earth VR have earned rave reviews and plaudits from enthusiasts. But we have yet to see a household phenomenon like Halo or Lotus 1-2-3 — applications that single-handedly propelled their respective platforms to wide use. At CES 2018, one industry analyst referred to VR as “drawerware,” referring to the likelihood of headsets to be stuffed in a drawer after a few forays into jejune worlds.

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I was positively tickled by the "drawerware" terminology, credit for which goes to Wired: 

The launches of the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and mobile headsets like the Gear VR were heavily hyped, but these new computing devices have failed to develop momentum in the mainstream market. Even Sony, with its newer PSVR headset, has struggled to sell 2 million units to the 70 million owners of the compatible PS4 console in the last year. And in its effort to push its exclusive Gear VR goggles, Samsung gave away perhaps millions of units by bundling a shiny new headset with new Galaxy phones.

"I call it drawerware," says GlobalData analyst Avi Greengart about the Gear VR and other early VR headsets. "It gets put in the back of a drawer ... I have a Vive and PlayStation VR. The experiences are fascinating, but they are not very sticky. Right now, VR is really searching for a killer app.

If you feel like there's a common theme for these articles, you're entirely correct. It seems that an industry which was entirely convinced, just a year ago, that the single biggest obstacle to mass adoption of VR was its price point, are now realizing that dropping price points haven't really helped, and started moving in the direction of the real problem: the simple fact that VR really isn't useful.

No, VR headsets did not top 1 million units in sales last quarter.

One very convenient thing about the Nintendo Switch's year so far has been the way its total units sold have matched its total units shipped. Because Nintendo have had no end of trouble ramping up production to meet demand, the Switch has been selling out everywhere all year long, which means that the numbers of units shipped is more or less equal to the number of units sold; you don't need to parse reported numbers for the Switch to figure out whether you're talking about sales, or just about production.

The same is not true of other consumer products, which normally ship more units than they sell in a quarter (the current quarter, i.e. October through December, is when these numbers normally reverse themselves, with far more units selling than shipping). This confusion, between shipments and sales, may be why we're seeing these two stories "breaking" at exactly the same time:

VG247: "VR headsets topped 1 million sales last quarter for the first time"

VentureBeat: "VR headsets pass 1 million shipments for the first time in a single quarter"

1 Million VR headsets shipped does not equal 1 million headsets sold. Sorry, VG247, but you're wrong, and VentureBeat is right:

While the debate about whether virtual reality is just some oversold hype rages on, the nascent industry can at least boast of having crossed an important milestone.

According to a report from Canalys today, one million virtual reality headsets shipped in the three months ending September 30. This was the first time the gadgets had topped this mark in a single quarter.

[...]

During the third quarter, Sony was the market share leader, with shipments of 490,000 PlayStation VR (PS VR) sets. Facebook’s Oculus was number two with 210,000 Rift headsets shipped. HTC came in third, with 160,000 Vive VR headsets. Those three companies are dominating, accounting for 86 percent of the VR headset market share in Q3.

Interestingly, none of the Microsoft/Windows 10 "Mixed Reality" headset manufacturers are on this list; the increase in units shipped is all from the existing three players in the space, i.e. Sony, HTC, and Oculus. Canalys credits the past summer's Oculus Rift fire sale (coupled with HTC's deep discounts) with making this possible, but remember that these are shipments of VR headsets, not sales. The fact that companies are shipping more headsets would be a solid indicator of those manufacturers' optimism about the prospect for selling them, of course, but the sales haven't happened yet, and it's far from certain that they will, given that there have been no other indicators so far of increased consumer interest in VR.

It also has to be said that 1 million units shipped in a quarter is pretty pathetic performance for a VR industry that was projected to be selling that many units each month by now. We'll see if the sales materialize, but I recommend waiting for those numbers to actually happen before popping the cork on the champagne bottles. Shipping inventory which will gather dust on shelves before needing to be cleared out at deep discounts, which is what Oculus just did with the Rift, is probably not the VR success story that the industry is hoping for.

VR takes another baby step as HTC announces wireless Vive

It's been well over a year since news first broke that Intel was working on high-end wireless VR, and just over a month since Facebook announced the Oculus Go, but it looks like HTC has beaten them both to market with the Vive Focus. As reported by SlashGear:

HTC has announced Vive Focus, a standalone virtual reality headset that eliminates the wires found on the regular HTC Vive. The company unveiled its standalone device at an event in China this evening, explaining that its new VR device gives people the freedom to enjoy virtual reality content wherever they are. Unlike some other standalone VR headsets, you don’t need your phone.

The HTC Vive Focus features a high-resolution AMOLED screen alongside a Snapdragon 835 VR Platform. HTC boasts that its model is the first of its kind to feature an inside-out 6-degree-of-freedom tracking tech otherwise known as 6DoF. Focus uses an open platform called Wave VR and can access the Viveport VR content.

The HTC Focus aims to offer something like the best of both current VR worlds — you get a premium experience as with higher end virtual reality headsets, but with the same portability as things like Gear VR that use a phone to eliminate wires. By eliminating both the PC and the phone requirements, users aren’t dependent on any other device for their VR experiences.

Having just launched a standalone headset under their own Vive brand, it probably shouldn't be a shock to hear that HTC won't be making a Daydream headset anymore.

Going wireless is something that VR desperately needs to do, assuming that wireless VR headsets can still provide an experience that's at least comparable to something like Sony's PSVR. The built-in 6DoF positional tracking may represent a step up over the Microsoft-backed Mixed Reality headsets, and there's no doubt that the Vive Focus looks a lot more like a finished consumer product than both the original Vive:

Oculus Go looks amateurish and cheap by comparison.

Whether the Vive Focus has the performance to truly handle the same higher-end VR as the wired Vive remains to be seen, of course, and neither sexy good looks nor wireless capability solves any of VR's other issues, but there's no disputing that Vive Focus looks like a small step forward. Combining the comfort and finish of PSVR and most MR headsets with the performance of the Vive and the standalone wireless potential of the Oculus Go basically makes the Vive Focus the template for VR, going forward. Make no mistake about it; this is the level new headsets need to meet or beat, going forward.

MSRP is still TBA, of course, and with all of VR's other problems (VR sickness, VR's fundamentally isolating nature, and VR's general uselessness, etc.) still unresolved, it's anyone's guess whether consumers will want even this sexy a piece of kit. As SlashGear puts it:

Focus is a welcomed addition to the growing VR segment, though it is unclear whether it will have large consumer appeal. While it is easy to see how such a portable higher-end device could have appeal in certain industries, for things like immersive medical training or exposure therapy, it is anyone’s guess whether consumers will find it compelling enough to pay the presumably higher price than they would otherwise spend for something that uses their existing smartphone.

My guess is that consumers won't be biting, but we'll see.

New PCVR headsets to work with Fall Creators Update Win10 only?

Was it just last week that I was praising Microsoft's new openness towards SteamVR?

From Gears of Biz:

Microsoft announced that a major update to its Windows operating system will be released globally on October 17. Release of Windows 10 “Fall Creators Update” will come the same day that Windows Mixed Reality headsets powered by the software hits the market, Microsoft executive vice president of operating systems Terry Myerson said in a blog post.

Unlike virtual reality gear already available, Windows headsets made by partners such as Acer, Asus, HP and Lenovo will not require cameras to track user movements, according to Myerson.

Windows headsets will be priced as low as $299, and will need to be plugged into computers powered by the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft said. [...] At [the company’s annual developers’ conference early this year ], Myerson said the update will offer, among other upgrades, “enhancements in gaming, security, accessibility, and immersive new experiences made possible by Windows Mixed Reality.”

Sigh... Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Microsoft appears to be banking on VR/AR/MR/whatever-R being a major driver of Windows 10 adoption, in the same way that everybody connected to VR seems to think that consumers will rush to the technology and drive all kinds of things in the process, but there's a major problem with that logic. Consumers haven't been interested in VR at all, up until now, and 48.43% of them are also still using Windows 7... and are, therefore, not interested in Windows 10, either. So, why would these same consumers suddenly decide that VR is so exciting that they'll switch to Windows 10 in order to pay hundreds of dollars to be early adopters the tech?

The existence of low-cost VR headsets, which are both easier to set up and more portable than existing gear, will almost certainly be enough to doom HTC's Vive and Oculus' Rift, but chaining the new headsets to Windows 10 guarantees that only 26.77% of the market will even consider buying one... having given zero fucks about VR headsets, up until now. If the new headsets were Windows 7 compatible, then at least you could sell them to most of the PC market, but nailing them to Windows 10 means that, for all the talk of SteamVR compatibility, they really aren't fully compatible with SteamVR, either, closing off a huge chunk of the one VR distribution platform that might actually be big enough to matter to VR's future.

Although, in one sense, I guess it's a match made in heaven. Nobody wants VR, and Microsoft can't give Windows 10 away, so bundling the two together at least makes for a package whose components are uniformly unpopular. GG, Microsoft! Well played.

Sarcasm aside, though, Microsoft really need to stop trying to force people to adopt Windows 10. I can't stress this enough; this kind of heavy-handed, borderline-coercive approach is the thing which is preventing Microsoft from rebuilding their relationship with their customers, something which they absolutely must do if they want to avoid having Windows 7 turn into the next XP.

HTC looking to sell?

As I've said before, while Gabe Newell might be totally cool with VR being "a complete failure," other players in the VR game may not be so cool with the idea of losing money hand over fist, for years on end, with only vague promises of possible profits to keep their shareholders happy. There's a reason why Oculus is cutting prices so aggressively, only months after Mark Zuckerberg pleaded with Facebook's shareholders for more time to establish VR as a thing.

Well, now it's HTC's turn. Earlier this week, they cut the price on the Vive to compete with the now-much-cheaper rift, but it would seem that their VR adventure has left HTC over-extended enough that they're considering selling their Vive division, and maybe just merging entirely with another firm.

From Bloomberg:

HTC Corp., the beleaguered manufacturer that once ranked among the world’s top smartphone makers, is exploring options that could range from separating its virtual-reality business to a full sale of the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Taiwanese firm is working with an adviser as it considers bringing in a strategic investor, selling its Vive virtual reality headset business or spinning off the unit, the people said. HTC has held talks with companies including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

A full sale of HTC, which has businesses ranging from VR to handset manufacturing, is less likely because it isn’t an obvious fit for a single acquirer, one of the people said.

[...]

No final decisions have been made, and HTC may choose not to proceed with any strategic changes, the people said. Representatives for HTC and Google declined to comment.

HTC bet heavily on VR, partnering with VALVe to product the Vive, in part because fierce competition in a mature smartphone market was slowing profits from that division of the company. With this week's price cut, and now this news, it sure looks to me like HTC have lost that bet. VR has not become a thing, the current generation of VR technology is not finding a place in the homes of consumers, and slowing smartphone sales are just not providing enough funds to feed the bottomless black hole of VR development. VALVe might have all the money, thanks to their near-monopoly on PC game distribution, and maybe GabeN can afford to keep throwing money into a bottomless black VR hole, but a publicly-traded company like HTC eventually needs to show results; non-GAAP press releases can only do so much to disguise a reality like this:

HTC drops the Vive's MSRP by US$200

Well, it's happened; HTC had finally done the obvious and predictable thing, and matched Oculus' price cut, apparently in the hope that making the headsets less expensive will stimulate some level of consumer interest. That's not just me snarking about VR, either; while they did their very best to spin this, even HTC admitted today that VR needs a bigger install base.

From Charlie Fink at Forbes:

HTC today announced a $200 price cut on its flagship VR system, The HTC Vive. The announcement follows a similar reduction in the price of Facebook's Oculus Rift last month. Both companies touted the price cut as an effort to grow their community, which HTC President Rikard Steiber said coincides with the arrival of flagship titles like "Doom" and "Ready Player One", based on the upcoming Speilberg VR movie. "I am so proud of the wide array of experiences now available for the Vive. Our developers deserve a bigger audience. The Vive is not just for first adopters anymore."

[...]

The guys did a great job putting on a game face on a dog of an announcement. The reason companies drop their price is because they're not selling enough product. Of course, if you happen to be one of those people on the edge, maybe this, with the product announcements, will tip you over, but I'm skeptical that is a significant number of consumers.

This is still a first adopter market. The need for a high-end gaming PC to run the high-end headsets limits the consumer base to gamers and hobbyists. VR is not easy to use. Ironically this is generally not the fault of HTC or Oculus. High-end gaming PCs are temperamental and difficult to configure. Downloads take a long time and are easily corrupted in the process. This is about as far from plug and play as you can possibly get.

Second, the competitors are coming, including stand-alone (wireless) headsets from HTC itself for Google Daydream. [...] Lenovo is also developing a stand-alone headset. [...] These headsets feature outside facing cameras, eliminating the need for tracking stations. Outside facing cameras can also bring in the real world to create Mixed Reality experiences. [...] In other words, the new stand-alone is superior technologically, wireless and cheaper.

Third, the Windows 10 MR release is weeks away. Firefox just released its VR browser. Sansar just opened its continuous VR world generator to the public. Acer is bringing a $300 dual-use - VR/MR - headset to the new Windows 10 MR platform. No gaming computer required.

Those are just the facts, to which I'll add a few whispers from insiders under very serious NDAs: there will be new, advanced high-end headsets from Vive and Oculus next year. They will compatible with Macs and PCs. They will feature advanced Bluetooth (BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy), better optics, advanced microphones, and hand tracking. The high-end is going to get a lot higher and pull away from the stand-alone models. When these models are announced, the prices for current the Vive and Oculus 1.0 models are going to face more price pressure. There will be substantial resale of these models when the new ones come out. HTC and Oculus need to move these off the shelves this Christmas, at whatever price.

In other words, don't bother with this generation of the tech, because it's already obsolete; Oculus and HTC are just hoping to move their unwanted inventory before the next-gen VR headsets arrive. Those next-gen VR headsets still won't have solved the problem of virtual locomotion, BTW, or the problem of VR sickness, or the fundamental problem of VR being basically useless, which means that they aren't going to sell, either. Let's face it: current-gen VR headsets aren't gathering dust on store shelves because they lack Bluetooth features.

Early in the smartphone era, handsets like the iPhone were expensive, but they were also obviously useful, resulting in plenty of consumers who wanted them, but who couldn't afford them. So when Google's Android brought the price of smartphones down, it stimulated the development of the smartphone market by putting products economically within reach of more of those same consumers.

VR is not in the same position; the problem isn't that consumers want VR, but can't afford it. Consumers are simply not interested in VR. When Oculus closed their BestBuy demo stations, it wasn't because they couldn't convince consumers to buy the Rift; they couldn't convince consumers to try the Rift, with some locations going days on end without doing a single demo (during the busy holiday shopping season, no less).

VR headset makers are still trying to convince people to buy into VR by showing them experiences that VR enhances; until they figure out some activity that VR actually enables (i.e. something that's made possible by VR, rather than just being made better by VR), the tech will continue to be a very tough sell, at any price.

News of Oculus' coming $200 headset met with lukewarm reception.

To say that the Oculus Rift got off to something of a rocky start would be understating things. Once the darling of the tech sector for having single-handedly revived interest in VR, Palmer Luckey's overrated startup first promised a headset that would launch at a price of a couple hundred bucks, with the capacity to run on a budget laptop... only to launch at $599, with the requirement that you drive it with a $1500+ high-performance PC. Oculus then struggled to fill pre-orders for the headset, eventually telling customers to buy their Rifts at Best Buy instead.

The Oculus team have gone on to watch impotently from the sidelines ever since. They tried to force developers and consumers into a walled-garden Rift-exclusive ecosystem, only to find themselves excluded from the bulk of VR development instead. They've fought a protracted legal battle with Zenimax, earning a split decision on that front, while being outsold by HTC's Vive, Sony's PS4 VR, and Samsung's Gear VR (that last carries a touch of irony, since Samsung produced the Gear VR in partership with Oculus). They've cut $200 from the Rift's asking price, only to see sales remain flat, and their share of the VR market remain stubbornly small.

So, I wasn't at all surprised when Oculus went on to slash the price of the Rift by half during their "Summer of Rift" promotion, or when they announced that the new regular price would be only $100 more than that. They did manage to surprise with one move, however: announcing that they had a new, $200, entry-level standalone VR device in development, and were planning to go head-to-head with Samsung's Gear VR, now that they'd lost the high-end market to HTC & Valve's Vive.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to make of this new move. Yes, a truly standalone headset is something the VR industry needs to move towards, as are lower price points, but could Oculus actually deliver both of those things at once, having failed (so far) to deliver either? And, even if they can, will anyone care? I think my my feelings on this move could have best been described as deep ambivalence, and it would seem that I wasn't the only one to feel that way.

From Katharine Byrne at MCV:

Hot off the heels of Oculus' temporary price cut to its Rift headset last week, a report surfaced on Friday that the company might also be preparing an even cheaper model of the Rift as a kind of budget successor.

Currently code-named 'Pacific', the headset will allegedly bridge the gap between mobile-based virtual reality and higher-end headsets like the Rift. It will also be wireless, according to the report, and operate as a standalone device without the need for additional hardware, such as a PC or phone – much like HTC's new rumoured standalone headset.

Analysts, however, are undecided on whether it will turn Oculus' fortunes around, whose Rift headset has been struggling to match the shipping numbers of both the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR.

"Oculus is losing the high-end PC race to HTC Vive, but the company has seen the massive potential from Gear VR’s strong market lead," Stephanie Llamas, vice president of research and strategy at SuperData Research told MCV.

"Facebook is not a company for the niche consumer – their selling point is how accessible their services are to anyone, anywhere. So finding something with the potential for mass penetration is a priority, especially with Rift’s bumpy past.

"However, an untethered, self-contained device for $200 seems like either a loss-leader or a highly simplified VR experience (for instance, Google and HTC’s new Daydream device will boast the same conveniences for a much higher price). Pacific may be a combination of both so that Facebook can finally have a long-term stake in the mass consumer market, but it's too soon to tell."

Oculus have gone from being the darlings of VR, the crown princes of virtuality waiting only to be crowned, to the court fools of the industry. Almost every move they've made thus far has been the wrong one, including being bought by Facebook for over three billion US dollars in what could fairly be described as possibly the sloppiest, most rushed buyout of that size in US corporate history. Oculus desperately need to do something to revive their flagging fortunes, and they need to do it soon, before restive shareholders (and the corporate board members who represent their interests) lose patience entirely. But is this Hail Mary play really going to be the thing that saves them?

I don't know; I don't think anybody knows. But Oculus have gone from being the leaders of the VR movement to being its also-rans, chasing already-announced products from other hardware makers rather than setting the next VR standards, and they don't seem to have any real idea what to do next, except to try doing what their competitors are succeeding with already. In a robust industry, there might be money to be made that way, if margins and price point can be kept low enough, but you don't get to be an industry leader by following, and the VR industry as a whole doesn't seem to have a lot of room for budget bit players. And the longer Oculus remain at the back of the pack, the harder it will be to make significant gains. 

Facebook's deep pockets notwithstanding, the team at Oculus are running out of time.

Oculus blinks, slashes Rift package's price to match PS4 VR.

From the International Business Times:

Oculus is temporarily cutting down the price of Oculus Rift virtual reality headset to match cheaper rivals like the PlayStation VR. Oculus, the company acquired by Facebook Inc. in 2014 for US$3 billion, is taking steps to discover if the price has been the bottleneck for the device to become the bestseller in the bunch.

The Oculus Rift starting Monday is priced at US$399, including the Touch controllers. The price reduction will run for six weeks as Facebook targets to determine whether price had been the major roadblock why its immersive gaming and stories did not take off, Oculus vice president for content Jason Rubin said in a statement.

Selling a device at, or even below, cost has been a fairly standard practice for videogame console manufacturers for decades. The idea is that you take a loss on the hardware, and make your profit with licensing fees and the like on the back end, once your platform is established. Normally, though, a firm that's planning to pursue this strategy does so right out the gate; Facebook initially priced the Rift at US$600, though, a price that didn't even include the Touch controllers, which weren't even available when the headset launched.

At the time, Oculus seemed confident that the buzz surrounding VR as a whole would see the Rift selling like hotcakes even at that premium price, but the Rift is now well behind HTC's Vive in total sales, and even the two of them combined can't come close to matching Sony's PS VR sales numbers, which is why Oculus slashed US$200 off the price earlier this year. Agressively matching Sony's price is the obvious next move, but with Oculus' identity as a premium-priced product already well and truly established, and the general public showing very little interest even in Sony's budget-priced offering, I have serious doubts about whether this move will prompt consumers to suddenly start buying Rift sets in large numbers.

Look, if you've been eying the Oculus Rift with envy, and only waiting for the price to drop before buying, than go ahead and buy one. It's your money; you do you. VR does not currently enable any new experiences; it can only be used to buff a limited set of familiar experiences. Someone first needs to identify a VR activity that can only be achieved with VR, and that I'll actually want to do; on that glorious day, if and when it comes, I will start comparison shopping for VR headsets. But until then, even at US$399, and even with the Touch controllers included for that price, the Oculus Rift is simply not useful enough to be worth that kind of money.

VR started the year by posting terrible sales numbers across the board; I've seen nothing since then to suggest that VR sales have improved significantly. Against that backdrop, for distant fourth place Oculus to be slashing their price point by half looks more like desperation than strategy.

Oculus cuts prices, which will be great if they're still allowed to sell headsets

With VR headsets of all kinds struggling to lure in consumers, and Oculus Rift in particular lagging behind its competitors, a price cut of some kind would seem to be long overdue, but at least it's finally happening.

From New Atlas:

If you were holding off on getting a high-end VR headset because of pricing, Oculus just made the hit on your wallet a bit lighter, with a significant price drop on both the Rift headset and Touch controllers.

Starting today, the Oculus Rift headset now costs US$499 (down from $599) and the Touch motion controls are now $99 (from $199). A bundle that includes both is now $598. The new pricing is reflected on Oculus' website, as well as Amazon and Best Buy.

Additionally, a third Oculus sensor (required for 360° tracking) drops to $59 from $79.

The Rift was always too expensive, so bringing the Rift more in line with PlayStation VR, and making it significantly less expensive than the HTC Vive, could help sales... assuming they're still allowed to sell headsets, of course, something that ZeniMax has filed an injunction to prevent.

Bringing the price point of a Rift bundle down by US$200 won't solve any of VR's other problems, though, including a lack of compelling content, a lack of consumer interest in the devices, generally, and unresolved issues like VR sickness, and I doubt that it'll propel users into VR. Consumers weren't sitting on the sidelines because VR was awesome-but-expensive, they were sitting on the sidelines because VR is basically useless, and therefore too expensive at any price. Unless VR becomes significantly more useful, the price is going to have to come down a lot more than this to make it appealing.

At least it's now just the cost of an expensive peripheral, though, and not the cost of a major appliance; seriously, you could have bought a new fridge for what Oculus was originally charging for the Rift. HTC should be following suit soon enough, and most reviews describe their product as superior (assuming you have a room to dedicate to a room-scale VR set-up), so if you're waiting for VR to come down in price before buying, you may want to wait a little while longer.

Gaben speaks again: Only 30 SteamVR apps have made more than $250K

One of the advantages of being a privately-held company, rather than a publicly-traded corporation, is the lack of pressure to keep driving up your share price. This relentless pressure means that, for publicly-traded corporations, you can't just make money; you always have to make more money than you made last year, or your share price falls, which can be catastrophic for people who e.g. have a bunch of your company's shares in their 401(k) or RRSP. 

A private company, by comparison, only has to make more money than they spend, or (in the case of dot-com startups) hold the promise of eventually making more money than they spend. Among other things, this can lead to more tolerance for risk-taking and innovation. Facebook lost money for years before figuring out a profitable business model and finally doing an IPO, but Facebook is now a publicly-traded company, with shareholders to answer to, and share prices that they have to continue to increase year-over-year, every year. 

Which may be why Mark Zuckerberg was only willing to admit under oath during the ZeniMax trial that Oculus probably won't turn a profit for ten years, and pleaded with shareholders to be patient while he keeps throwing good money after the $3.5B he's already thrown at VR:

“I would ask for the patience of the investor community,” he said. “Because we’re going to invest a lot in this, and it’s not going to return or be really profitable for us for quite a while.”

Gabe Newell, on the other hand, is being remarkably blunt about HTC Vive's shortcomings, and openly talking about how he's OK with VR failing completely. And he's apparently not done yet.

From c|net:

During a recent media event, Valve revealed that only 30 VR apps have made over $250,000 so far on Steam. Now focusing his company heavily on VR development, Valve president Gabe Newell remains bullish on the future of VR, but isn’t shying away from sharing frank assessments of the still young industry.

Sorting content ‘by VR’ through the Steam store, the number of titles that support the technology comfortably exceeds 1,000. While a few early indie VR titles have seen a few million in revenue, according to Valve only 30 of Steam’s VR apps have made over $250,000.

This could be a fairly discouraging figure for aspiring VR developers, as Steam is surely the most popular source for PC VR content, considering the apparent sales advantage of the HTC Vive over the competition, combined with the fact that SteamVR works with other headsets like the Oculus Rift and OSVR.

This figure isn't at all surprising, considering how poorly VR headsets, generally, have been selling, but it is a little unusual to hear the head of a company that's developing VR hardware and software speak so openly about it. But then, maybe that's just because Gaben doesn't have shareholders to answer to. Valve doesn't have to keep making more money than it made the year before; they just have to turn a profit, and can afford to lose money betting on VR's future, in a way that publicly-traded Facebook may find increasingly difficult, even though Facebook may actually have more cash on hand.

It's a very interesting dynamic, and it'll be even more interesting to see how this plays out as VR continues striving to become a thing. VR really isn't ready yet, and it really does need for hardware and content developers to be willing and able to spend boatloads of cash with no guarantee that this R&D will result in actual profits, ten years from now. Facebook, with billions of USD in reserve, should be well-positioned for this, but it may prove to be Valve who have the freedom and flexibility to actually spend the money, without risking an investors' revolt.

Stay tuned...

Most expensive VR headset "barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience," according to its makers.

I'm not surprised that this is the case; I'm only surprised that it's being discussed with such candor.

From AndroidHeadlines.com:

Valve’s President Gabe Newell said that the virtual reality (VR) industry still needs time to develop. While speaking to reporters at an informal meeting earlier this week, Newell made some surprising comments about the HTC Vive headset that Valve helped develop. After acknowledging that the Vive is the most expensive VR headset on the market, Valve’s chief said that “it’s barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience.” As such, the VR ecosystem that Valve and HTC are currently trying to build will still need more time to grow and fulfill its potential, provided that ever happens.

The famous entrepreneur compared the current VR industry to the PC market of the 1980s in the sense that people were originally buying PCs without really understanding what they can be used for. Those types of consumers are also now driving the growth of VR hardware sales, Newell believes, adding that VR will hopefully end up being as successful as PCs were and still are. [...] Valve’s chief also said VR hardware sales are currently inhibited by the general lack of content, adding that there’s currently not a single VR game on the market that could be considered a system-seller.

Newell’s comments are somewhat similar to those recently given by Mark Zuckerberg who said that the Facebook-owned Oculus has yet to develop “good virtual reality.” Overall, it seems that most major players in the industry are still cautiously optimistic about this technology, but everyone is apparently waiting for third-party developers to start making more high-quality experiences for VR hardware. Given that state of affairs, it’s possible that the VR industry is in for another slow year in terms of growth.

OK, a few things about this:

1. PCs in the '80s absolutely could do things right out of the box, which is why people bought them. Among other things, they could run word processor and spreadsheet software (useful for business), and play games (already very popular). They were even simple enough to program for that users could write their own programs for them, and were encouraged to do so; Commodore computers (also very popular at the time) all came with BASIC built-in, and manuals on BASIC programming. PCs in the '80s were not nearly as hard to sell as VR headets are today.

2. Hype drove early sales of VR; now that the hype has died, nothing is driving them. PlayStation VR sales dropped off a cliff after some early success, and the only VR headsets that have moved more than a million units are Gear VR and Google Cardboard, both of which managed to get to market last spring, while the hype was still hot and VR's many issues not front and centre in the coverage. And those are the VR success stories; none of the other VR headsets is anywhere close to doing as well as those three. The hype is over now; all of VR's recent PR has been bad, and the only people still bullish about VR's future are people who've invested heavily in VR succeeding.

3. VR cannot afford another slow year in sales. VR is a hardware purchase, and not just a software purchase or a Cloud-based service, and one that really doesn't sell itself -- even VR's proponents admit that it needs to be experienced in order to make converts. Except that BestBuy is closing hundreds of Oculus Rift demo stations because nobody wanted to try them. The clock is ticking: retailers like BestBuy can't afford to stock VR headsets that aren't selling. If VR hardware doesn't start to show sales performance soon, stores will stop carrying the gear, and that will be the end of the story for this generation of VR hardware.

4. VR isn't going to see a flood of third-party development unless they can improve the headsets' adoption rate. There's no money to made developing for VR, because there aren't enough users in the marketplace who can buy VR content. Given how little interest consumers have for VR, and give how expensive it is to develop for VR, third-party developers just can't afford to develop for VR right now. Which may be why Valve has three VR games in the works for the HTC Vive that they helped develop: nobody else is going to make games for the thing, so they have to.

It is noteworthy that GabeN is willing to be so candid about VR's issues. Zuckerberg's original comments were made in response to questioning, under oath, during the ZenMax v. Oculus trial; he later expanded on them while trying to calm shareholders' concerns about the Oculus purchase, basically pleading with them to be patient after his blunt admission that Facebook would lose money for years trying to make VR a thing. In other words, his comments happened because he had no choice in the matter; he couldn't refuse to answer the question at trial, and he really was forced to do damage control afterward.

GabeN wasn't in that situation. His comments were volunteered during an informal meeting. That's a little amazing, when you think about it, and goes to illustrate why gamers hold such a high opinion of the man. Zuckerberg would never have commented about the current state of VR if he hadn't been forced to; GabeN, by comparison, is publicly musing about how he's OK with it, if VR fails, no matter how much money Valve would end up flushing along the way.

None of that changes VR's fundamental issue, though. The tech simply isn't ready, and the content simply isn't there. And with retailers already starting to check out of the VR gold rush, VR developers, hardware and content, are running out of time to turn it around.

Is VR too isolating to succeed?

I'm not a huge fan of social media. I suspended my Facebook account years ago because I wasn't using it, never had a Twitter account, and cancelled my Battle.Net account, thus going cold turkey from the one online forum where I posted with any regularity. Perhaps because I'm an introvert, I spend a lot of time (quite happily, I might add) in my own head; one of my favourite ways to spend a quiet afternoon involves a good book and no other distracting people around.

Perhaps that's why, of all the problems facing VR, this is one that hadn't occurred to me.

From Ramona Pringle at CBC News:

Consider this: the most popular tech of the last decade has been social. Studies show that when we check email and social media, we actually get a hit of oxytocin, the same "cuddle chemical" that is released when we embrace, or fall in love. That's what makes it all so addictive, and why we keep coming back. Yet VR is the opposite: it excels at novelty, but falls short on human connection. And that could be the biggest factor in VR's stalled growth.

Early in 2016, the research group SuperData estimated Playstation VR would sell 2.6 million units. A few months ago, they revised that figure to just 750,000. At the same time, less than a year after flooding its locations with Oculus Rift VR "pop-up" stations, electronics giant Best Buy is closing down almost half of its in-store demos. Workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups told Business Insider that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. People just didn't seem to want to try out the headsets.

That's a huge problem, because casual shoppers can't get a sense of a VR experience just by walking by. They actually need the immersive experience, which requires physically putting on the headset.

But that's where the inherently isolating design of VR headsets becomes apparent. Once you put on the headset, you're separated from the world around you. And sure, that heightened level of escapism is one of VR's great attributes. But if you're by yourself in the middle of Best Buy, putting on a helmet that blinds you to your surroundings may just be a bit more vulnerable than most people want to feel when they're out at the mall.

Even at home, where one can fully appreciate VR's capacity for immersion while in the comfort and safety of your living room, it's still equally isolating — a far cry from family movie night or a games night with friends.

It's obvious, when you think about it. At a time when gaming is pushing players harder and harder in an online multiplayer direction, VR games are all solo affairs. At a time when the President of the United States tweets incessantly, and when people get most of their "news" from Facebook and Twitter, VR cuts users off from the social media sphere completely. While some might see that as an advantage for VR, there's no real doubt about it: VR is swimming upstream on this one.

Cheaper headsets for PC don't fix this problem. PlayStation VR is already cheaper than the current crop of PC options, and although it sold better than the Rift, or the Vive, it still didn't sell well. 

Perhaps this is why Mark Zuckerberg has been talking for a while now about "social VR," even though nobody knows what that means or what it would look like, or why Sony tried to convince us that people were going to want to play VR party games, in which one person goggles in and makes an ass of themselves in front of a room full of casual acquaintances who then can't be seen as they mock you mercilessly. It was the closest that VR could come to any kind of social experience, and was deemed to be worth promoting, even if it sucked. 

If VR was actually useful for something that couldn't be done without it, and that people actually wanted or needed to do, this wouldn't matter so much, but VR simply isn't very useful. The fact that it's also expensive, uncomfortable, frequently disorienting, sometimes actually nauseating, and has so many other unresolved issues all pile onto this central problem. Add to that VR's physically and socially isolating nature, something that may well be fundamental to the technology, and you may have too many problems to be overcome... ever.

What happened to VR?

Well, if you're reading my blog, then you probably already know what happened, but Business Insider has a pretty fair assessment of the state of VR play:

Over the past year, evidence has stacked up that VR isn't as hot as everyone thought it'd be, and it feels poised to go the way of the smartwatch, a once-promising new computing platform that ultimately flopped once introduced into the real world.

The evidence is tough to ignore.

Following the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, we have yet to see a breakthrough game or app. Plus, the cost is prohibitive for most people: The headsets start at $600, and go up from there if you want the motion controllers and other accessories. Plus you need a powerful computer to run the hardware, which will run you at least another $500.

Sony was supposed to be the savior of the high-end VR headset. Its new PlayStation VR is designed to work with the tens of millions of PlayStation 4 consoles already out in the wild, giving it an immediate advantage over the competition. But, like with Vive and Oculus Rift, there wasn't much enthusiasm around the games and content for the PlayStation VR.

Google appears to be stumbling too. It slashed the price of its new Daydream View headset this week to $49 following a report from Amir Efrati of The Information that Google is "disappointed" with early usage numbers for the device.

Meanwhile, overall sales of VR headsets are very low, and PlayStation VR appears to have performed well worse than expected, according to data compiled by market research firm SuperData.

Given VR's lack of a value proposition, I was expecting to see that sales of these expensive white elephants had suffered, but I had no idea that sales for VR hardware were this terrible. So far, only Gear VR has actually topped the million mark in sales; PSVR managed only 28.85% of its sales forecast from only a few months earlier; the Rift and the Vive don't have a million users between them; and Google is selling Daydream at fire sale prices, apparently oblivious to the fact that a $50 add-on to an $900 Pixel smartphone still puts its VR offering well above the price point of either Oculus' or HTC's offerings.... for a smartphone-based VR experience.

This is beyond simply "not pretty." This is disastrous. And there's no sign of it improving significantly anytime soon. It's a good thing that Mark Zuckerberg is OK with spending another $3 billion on VR R&D before seeing a dollar in profits, because they're not going to be making a profit on Oculus anytime in the foreseeable future. Neither are HTC, Valve, Sony, or Google. Or anyone else that's pinned their hopes (and futures) to the VR hype train.

BI's article ends with the blunt assertion that VR "is going to remain a niche product at best." Honestly, given how badly VR is performing so far, and how many hurdles it faces, I think that's an overly optimistic assessment. So far, VR isn't even a large enough niche to turn a profit, given how expensive it is to develop for the platform.

In other VR news

Zenimax v. Oculus seems to be gathering steam, with Mark Zuckerberg taking the stand today, and Zenimax claiming that Oculus/Facebook have destroyed evidence, so I'm thinking that the last thing Team Oculus want to hear is that developers are more interested in HTC's Vive than in Oculus' Rift, as a platform.

Wishes are not fishes, though, and interest in HTC Vive apparently is surging, as VR developers reveal they prefer it to Oculus Rift. At least, so says Richard Scott-Jones at PCGamesN:

Game developers making VR titles are showing a preference for Valve and HTC’s Vive headset over the Oculus Rift, according to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017 survey. On every category - games in development, future platform of choice, general interest and platform exclusives - the Vive was in the lead. This is especially significant since the Vive was behind the Oculus in some categories as recently as last year.

Among the survey respondents who are making VR games, “24 percent are currently making games on HTC and Valve’s Vive headset, 23 percent are supporting Oculus Rift, and 13 percent are supporting Sony’s PlayStation VR,” according to the findings. Though that’s a scant lead for the Vive, it's a huge surge compared to last year, when it was on just six percent (the same as the PlayStation VR) to Oculus Rift's 19 percent.

Looking to the future, when devs were asked which platform they would use for the game after their next, 40 percent said the Vive, 37 the Oculus Rift, and 26 the PlayStation VR, in another clear sign that more devs are interested in developing for PC than console when it comes to VR.

An explanation for this apparent trend is not given, but it's not unreasonable to think that Oculus' "walled garden" approach to a VR market that basically doesn't even exist yet may be turning developers off the Rift as a platform; HTC and Valve have pursued a much more open approach to development on the Vive, and with the most popular PC games marketplace, Steam, available for the distribution of Vive games, Oculus' attempt at exclusivity may just end up squeezing them out of the VR market before that market has even formed.

At least, that's how Epic Games' Tim Sweeney sees it; from digitaltrends.com:

Epic games co-founder and Unreal Engine creator Tim Sweeney recently said in an interview that the HTC Vive virtual reality headset is outselling the Oculus Rift by 2-to-1 worldwide. Why? Because Oculus VR is following Apple’s software distribution model that many describe as a walled garden, which means the company’s device supports software sold through a proprietary store by default. By contrast, HTC doesn’t use that method for the Vive, providing a completely open platform where owners can purchase games and experiences from many different online markets.

“When you install the Oculus drivers, by default you can only use the Oculus store,” he said. “You have to rummage through the menu and turn that off if you want to run Steam. Which everybody does. It’s just alienating and sends the wrong message to developers.”

The fact that PCGamesN's survey showed developers to be more interested in HTC Vive than they are in PSVR, in spite of PSVR initial sales success, would seem to support this theory; PSVR is also a walled garden, and a console to boot, and the Vive's open approach and PC platform position (Steam's 125+ million users is still far more than PS4's 50+ million) seem to be outweighing even PSVR's larger installed user base when it comes to generating developers' interest in the platform. With Oculus having both slower sales and a walled garden, Vive may have too many advantages for Oculus to overcome, even before any impact is felt from the huge spectacle of their court battle with Zenimax.

Added to that, VR generally is still struggling to convince consumers to invest, and cheaper PCVR headsets are coming to compete with both the Rift and the Vive. Facebook's deep pockets notwithstanding, Oculus may be in trouble, here.

VR still isn't catching on, and people are starting to notice

It looks like the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend were not kind to VR, because I'm suddenly seeing a lot of stories like this one, from bizjournals.com:

This year was supposed to be a breakout one for virtual reality.

For the first time, motivated fans of the technology can choose from Facebook’s Oculus RIft, Google Daydream, Sony’s Playstation VR, HTC Vive and Samsung’s Gear VR. One analyst estimates some 4.1 million people will buy a VR headset by the end of the year — far from the breakout that had been expected.

In a new report, SuperData says Sony will likely end the year selling just 750,000 PlayStation VR headsets, significantly lower than the firm’s earlier forecast of 2.6 million units. Daydream will likely sell 261,000 units this year, lower than SuperData’s estimate of 450,000.

Meanwhile, sales of the Gear VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift will likely come in at 2.3 million units, 450,000 units and 355,000 units respectively, roughly in line with SuperData’s earlier forecasts.

High cost, lack of content, and low demand are cited as the reasons why VR isn't catching fire the way VR evangelists have been insisting was about to happen any day now. Superdata, remember, who are getting all kinds of exposure today for revising their VR sales forecasts downwards, were predicting (not very long ago) that VR would be worth $30 billion a year in revenue by 2020; it looks like reality is starting to reassert itself, instead, reality being the things that continue to be true regardless of what you want to believe.

VR's (not-at-all) surprisingly low sales performance may explain why Ubisoft just announced that all of their VR games will feature cross-platform support for all of the different VR headsets available, including Vive, Rift, PSVR, and the upcoming Windows 10 PCVR flavours. It may also explain why HTC is already hard at work on Vive 2.0, which will apparently be lighter and more comfortable to wear/use, among other things (HTC Vive has only sold 140,000 units so far).

I stand by my earlier predictions on VR. The technology is not ready; it's not only too expensive, lacking a killer app, and suffering from low consumer interest, it has fundamental unsolved problems which will prevent VR developers from solving those three problems for years to come. And until VR is not only more powerful, more comfortable, more portable, more versatile, easier to use, more useful, and less expensive, it's not going to see wide adoption.

HTC Vive goes wireless!

And it'll only cost you an extra $220. On top of the $800 that the Vive itself costs. And, of course, the $1500 or so for the PC that you need to drive this thing, because HTC haven't yet managed to do what Oculus have done with the Rift, and make it work with existing mid-range gaming PCs.

Yeah... good luck with that.

From UploadVR:

HTC today announced a tether-less VR upgrade kit for its SteamVR device, made by TPCAST, one of the first of 33 companies to join the Vive X Accelerator. A preview version of the kit was shown off today at Alibaba’s “11/11” global shopping festival in Shenzhen, China. This is not the wireless prototype device in the works at Quark VR.
...
Speaking to UploadVR in a phone interview, Graylin said that the experience would “greatly improve” the overall Vive experience, with no “noticeable difference” for factors like latency. The product will be available to pre-order with a standard battery, though Graylin said that a bigger battery will be sold eventually. We’re told the standard battery can deliver around one and a half hours of power. The bigger battery would rest in a user’s pocket.

Oh, that's right! I forgot all about the battery life problem! Although I suppose it may be less of a problem that the cable thing, since the average user won't be able to spend all that much time in VR at stretch, anyway.

I guess I shouldn't snark too much, though, especially since I'd identified the tethers as one of the many issues that VR needs to solve. I don't know that this counts as fully solving it, and it makes the Vive look even more like a half-baked dev kit rather than a finished product, but it's a start, anyway.

Still, though... $220, on top of the Vive's already premium cost, for this?

That looks to me like a tough sell, especially since it doesn't actually make the Vive any more useful. It makes it easier to use, yes, but not more useful, because VR still isn't any more useful than it was before this dingus, which means that the HTC Vive is now a $1000 spend for something that's going to spend most of its time gathering dust next to users' PCs. And looking ugly. I'm with Jim Sterling on this one, that's some ugly design.