VR won't be a "meaningful" part of interactive entertainment for YEARS, according to SONY

Among all the languishing and failed VR products, Sony's PlayStation VR stands out as the closest thing VR has to a success story. Sure, Google's Cardboard VR or Samsung's Gear VR may have moved more units, but PSVR has handily outsold all integrated-display VR headsets, combined. The problem is that even those industry-leading sales numbers are far below VR's early projections; worse yet, they were entirely front-loaded, with basically nobody buying in after that first wave of early adopters.

PSVR fans kept showing up for E3, year after year, hoping for a big VR announcement from Sony, only to leave disappointed. The next-gen PS5, which will land in stores only days from today equipped with more than enough grunt for VR, does have a camera module available for sale, but it isn't PSVR-compatible; if you want to use your last-gen PSVR with the next-gen PS5, you'll need an adapter. The only thing that could speak more loudly to VR being low on the priority list for Sony would be some sort of official statement to that effect, from Sony themselves.

And now, as reported by The Washington Post, we have exactly that:

Though immersion appears to be the focal point of Sony’s PS5 push, Ryan says there won’t be any immediate leaps forward from Sony in the most immersive gaming experience, virtual reality (VR). PlayStation was at the forefront of the virtual reality market for consoles, having launched a PSVR headset in 2016. While 5 million headsets were sold by January this year, sales were slowing in 2020. There are currently no public plans for a PS5-specific headset. Instead, Sony is offering adapters to use the PS4′s PSVR headset with the new console.

“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”

And that, as they say, is that. The most successful player in the VR game has no plans for a next play, anytime in the near-to-foreseeable future. Stick a fork in VR, folks; it's done.

VR apologists will likely look to Ryan's "at some stage"/"in the future" remarks as signs of life, but don't be fooled; that's just the corpse, twitching. Sony has to say something to assure buzzword-sensitive investors that they haven't given up on one of tech's juicier buzzwords, because admitting that VR's years-long campaign is ending in defeat could cause the share price of whoever admits it first to drop sharply, something which Sony would rather avoid. 

But their reluctance to flee the VR field first should not be mistaken for a desire to keep fighting the VR fight; Sony is done with VR, unless and until somebody else succeeds in convincing consumers to adopt the technology en masse. With the second-biggest player being Facebook VR née Oculus, who have nailed their VR fortunes to the larger platform's declining user count, that's looking less and less likely to happen.

Of all the companies doing VR business, the only one that might have been making money from VR was Sony. What we've now learned is that even Sony are not making enough money from VR for the tech to be worth any more investment. 

Oh, sure, Facebook and Valve have deep enough pockets that they can probably continue to lose money on VR for a while yet, but don't expect that to propel VR into the forefront of the public consciousness; it won't, and neither will the upcoming Ready Player Two (the sequel to VR-advert/movie Ready Player One, which also didn't more the needle on VR).

It's all over save the shouting; how long the likes of Facebook and Valve will keep shouting into the VR void remains to be seen.

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.

Creativity is officially dead and so is VR

I must have gone to bathroom, or something, when this bit popped up during Sony's E3 event last week:

It's a very pretty video, with very pretty music, and it takes just over two minutes (2:10, to be precise) before actually fading into any gameplay from the game itself. And yes, it's Tetris. Like, literally, just Tetris but with Tron's aesthetics.

According to the game's Wikipedia entry, Tetris Effect has been in development for 6 years. It took them 6 years to add Tron's glowy graphic style to the now-34-years-young Tetris. Oh, and a pause button, or "an all-new Zone mechanic that allows players to stop time," as it's gushingly called by UploadVR.

Available soon on Windows, PS4, and PSVR, Tetris Effect should be all the proof you need that creativity is dead. They spent six years making a VR version of Tetris, in an environment where you can't turn around and spit without hitting a free version of Tetris, and thirty four years after Tetris was first released. In thirty-four years, nobody has succeeded in adding anything of worth or note to the gameplay of Tetris, and I don't expect that Tetris Effect will succeed where everyone else has failed.

The fact that this utter failure of creativity features prominently on UploadVR's list of E3's Biggest VR Announcements should tell you everything you need to know about the state of VR, right now.

Oh, yeah, and the other one: Sony's E3 presser

Well, if I'm going to cover them, I may as well cover them all.

Sony comes into this year's E3 as the clear industry leader. They may have spent last year more or less coasting, but the strong work they put it to build a stable of solid first-party studios has paid off in spades, and this years God of War continued the streak. Really, all they had to do was not fuck it up. So, did they manage to not fuck it up?

A joke that never gets old, by Alanah Pearce

Sony's E3 press conference did some... creative, shall we say? things with its format, which were more bewildering than impressive. Much like last year, actually, when Sony used creative lighting and a full symphony orchestra to propel the proceedings, which also left some scratching their heads. Breaking the momentum of their show while they moved people from one room to another was clearly not a good idea, though; and talented as he was, the banjo player was also clearly not as effective as last year's full symphony orchestra. Yes, it's good to see a company of Sony's size take some creative risks, but the poor logistics should have been obvious, here.

Once they finally stopped walking attendees from room to room, though, and started showing them actual games, things started to pick up.

Virtual meets reality

From Jon Evans TechCrunch:

“Despite many pronouncements that 2016 was the year of VR, a more apt word for virtual reality might be absence,” The Economist observed caustically last summer, noting that during that year forecasts of combined sales of VR hardware and software dropped from $5.1bn to $3.6bn to the harsh reality of $1.8bn. But hey, one rough holiday season does not an industry make, right? Surely in 2017 things began to —

— oh. "Shock Stat: In 2017, VR Headset Shipments For Most Top Brands Went DOWN Compared To 2016." So much for the many predictions that VR headset shipments would grow exponentially for years. Crow appears to be the appetizer for nearly every industry dinner these days. But that was before the Oculus Go, right? Except … the Go seems to have sold at most a quarter of a million units in its first few weeks, far behind the comparably priced Nintendo Switch released months earlier, and as I write this languishes well outside the top 20 of Amazon’s “Video Games > Accessories” bestsellers.

[...]

I dropped by the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara this week, and my main takeaway was that the industry has essentially abandoned the consumer AR/VR space, at least for now. Everyone’s aiming at AR/VR for work now. But how many jobs are there, really, where complex information needs to be accessed in a hands-free way? How many problems can be solved by VR conferencing but not videoconferencing? Sure, they exist, and the tech can be spectacularly great for them; but, again, for now at least, we’re talking Next Little Niche.

[...]

It’s the very early days of a new technology. It’s expensive. It’s still hardware-intensive. We’re still figuring out its best uses, and how it interacts with human physical location, and a whole new grammar of storytelling. But the Oculus Kickstarter launched almost six years ago, and I’ve seen a whole lot of VR/AR/mixed-reality demos since then, and every time, I walk away thinking: “This technology has so much potential.”

But in order to be the Next Big Thing at some point you have to actually start realizing your potential [...] the disheartening truth is that, despite the low-price new standalone hardware, despite all the effort that’s gone into software and design and storytelling, I still don’t feel like we’re meaningfully closer to that than we were two years ago.

Have I mentioned lately that articles like this are becoming increasingly common? Sure, people who are materially or emotionally invested in VR are still trying to sound bullish on its prospects, but those forecasts are looking increasingly ridiculous in the face of clear evidence that VR simply isn't happening, their foundations made of nothing but hype and hot air.

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.

Another bad sign for VR?

One of the earliest high-profile VR games to see release was EVE: Valkyrie.

A dogfighting shooter set in CCP's EVE Online universe, it seemed to be generally regarded as a decent example of something that VR did well, while also being an excellent demonstration of VR's limitations. PC Powerplay described it as "easily one of the prettiest VR launch titles," and "arguably the best VR experience currently available for the [Oculus Rift] platform," in the same review where they described the same game as "a prime example of how we’re still at the very first generation of VR games - take away the VR headset, and there’s actually a remarkably shallow experience here."

Regardless of the game's excellence and/or limitations, though, there's no denying that it was one of the most highly-hyped early titles for VR, with CCP planning simultaneous Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR releases. Now, however, CCP have apparently decided that they'd like to make some money back from EVE: Valkyrie, which is why they're planning to release a non-VR version of the game on Steam. Because of course they are.

From Kotaku:

This week, CCP Games announced a massive shakeup to its immersive VR shooter EVE: Valkyrie. A free expansion coming in September called “Warzone” will, among other things, remove the need for a virtual reality headset. By decoupling Valkyrie from its VR roots, a much wider player base will be able to log in and play CCP’s unique and beautiful shooter.

[...]

In addition to removing the VR headset requirement, Warzone will add a new mode called “Extraction,” which will work as a sort of Capture-The-Flag-in-space, forcing players to navigate their way out of intricate complexes while trying to return the enemy’s “flag” to their base. Extraction is the fourth competitive game mode in Valkyrie, and the second to be added as part of a free content patch for all owners of the game.

I am surprised only that anybody is surprised.

Meanwhile, CBC News is reporting that VR developers are doubling down on long-form content, like virtual concerts, even while "VR at any length has struggled to go mainstream — weighed down by technology, cost, motion sickness fears and headset accessibility —  with some analysts even speculating its demise." The biggest technology problem that VR content makers will have to overcome may simply be the weight of the headsets, which make them too heavy to wear comfortably for extended periods, according to Occulus themselves:

While the tech will doubtless improve with time and further development, unless VR headset makers shrink the size and weight of the gear down to the point where wearing them is more like wearing ski goggles than welder's goggles, I don't see longer form content as being the solution to VR's issues. And there's still the simple fact that it's expensive; even Samsung's GearVR and Google's Daydream require thousand-dollar, high-end smartphones for VR to really work well, and if it's not working well, then what's the point?

With VR adoption stagnant, makers of VR gambling on content that their few users physically can't endure, and VR launch titles decamping for the larger user bases of Steam's non-VR marketplace... I have to say, I really don't see how this current generation of VR headsets can ever become a thing.

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.

PlayStation VR doing better than expected, says Sony

There are times when Kotaku bore me, and there are times when they frustrate the hell out of me, but every so often, there are times when they get it exactly right, and their headline for this piece was right on sarcastic point:

PlayStation VR Is Doing Better Than Expected, Sony Says

The article that follows is filled with gems, too, like:

It’s not difficult to meet expectations when they’re set low, and Sony was clearly cautious when it came to making projections for the success of its new virtual reality technology.

Or:

While the device has sold better than Sony predicted, it’s unclear how much of that is because of higher than expected demand or simply because the company was never especially bullish on the new technology to begin with.

I find this interest, in part, because the crew at Kotaku were pretty bullish on VR's prospects for a long time, to a point that I once described them as "VR evangelists." Perhaps the VR honeymoon is over?

Reality, after all, is that which persists regardless of what you want to be true. Whatever spin Sony are choosing to put on their PSVR sales numbers, there's no way around the simple fact that they've sold 915K VR headsets to a market of 53M PS4 owners, which is an adoption rate of 1.7%

That's better than PC's VR adoption rate (HTC Vive and Oculus Rift together haven't sold 900K units yet), but it's still not good, and it's nowhere near enough to turn the PSVR ecosystem into something that third-party developers can make money making content for. If Sony are the only developer making PSVR content, then it's not ever going to have a large enough library to become a mainstream way to experience the PS4; it will remain peripheral.

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.

Scorpio may not be 90 FPS VR capable, after all

Either that, or VR just isn't the selling point that it seemed to be, a year ago.

From TweakTown:

One of the main selling points of Microsoft's new high-end Project Scorpio--besides delivering "the highest res at the best frame rates without no compromises"--was its virtual reality capabilities; Microsoft was keen on pushing a higher-end VR experience that would eclipse what Sony offers with its PS4-powered PlayStation VR headset. Xbox General Manager of Game Publishing Shannon Loftis has said that Project Scorpio can deliver high-fidelity VR at 90 FPS.

But has this changed? Has Microsoft shifted gears away from premium VR gaming with its new console? All mention of 'high fidelity VR' has been erased from Project Scorpio's website. This is particularly interesting timing because Microsoft has recently hired many of the industry's top tech-makers like ASUS, Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP to create Windows 10 powered VR headsets. I postulated that this move would help foster Project Scorpio's own ambitious VR plans, but it appears that instead of pushing things forward, these OEMs might have encountered a snag in the progress, thus affecting the console's VR-ready status. 

One thing that's also different is that Microsoft no longer claims that Project Scorpio is the "first and only console to enable true 4K gaming." This is likely at the behest of its own community and Sony fans, especially considering the PS4 Pro can deliver upscaled 4K gaming as well as VR.

I doubt this development will affect Scorpio's reception much, one way or the other, but it is interesting. It either points to (a) VR having a much higher cost in graphical processing power that Microsoft expected, or to (b) VR being significantly less attractive as a selling point that Microsoft expected, back when Scorpio was first announced. Both of these may say more about the problems facing VR, than about the problems facing MS's new XBox model as they attempt to claw their way back into competition for the current "console" generation.

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.

Is PSVR already a failure?

PlayStation VR is the best-selling non-mobile VR headset so far, with an attractive price point and low hardware requirement that drew people to it over the holiday season, in spite of an anaemic (IMO) lineup of available content. Less capable than Oculus' Rift or HTC's Vive, PSVR was nonetheless more popular, and was being touted by some as the VR rig that would help drive widespread adoption. 

So it's a little weird to see articles popping up like this one, from Upload:

Community Download: Is Sony Pulling Away From PlayStation VR?

Sixteen days ago we exited what many people were calling the “year of virtual reality.” 2016 was considered to be the year that VR finally made the transition from science fiction fantasy to a real consumer product available at your local Best Buy. Last year, the Oculus Rift (Facebook), HTC Vive (HTC and Valve) and the PlayStation VR (Sony) all debuted, and Samsung just announced 5 million of its Gear VR headsets have shipped. The PS VR in particular was anticipated as the guaranteed success of the tethered headsets. With a plug-and-play install base of around 50 million PS4s, and the monolithic might of Sony behind it, it was the best bet the VR industry had. And yet as 2017 begins, the question must be asked: is Sony already beginning to pull away from PS VR?

Now before you all start tying your move controllers into nunchucks with which to bludgeon me to death, let me explain myself. No one is saying that Sony is abandoning its newborn platform a couple months after launch. There are, however, some eyebrow-raising things to consider. Lets knock them out one at a time.

The list includes Sony's closure of Guerrilla Cambridge, their own (i.e. first party) VR studio; the recent failure of PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Move, demonstrating their willingness to cut bait rather than keeping fishing, if consumers fail to bite; and sales that ended up being well below projections, something which is currently bedevilling VR across the board, which would seem to indicate that consumers aren't biting.

And that's not the only article of its king to come out in the last few days -- check out this piece as well, from Forbes:

Is Sony's PSVR Doomed Heading Into 2017?

Everyone is buzzing over the Nintendo Switch right now, but I wanted to cast my attention backwards to a piece of hardware that came out just a few months ago, Sony’s PlayStation VR. Despite debuting in October 2016, the first console-based VR headset seems to have almost disappeared completely from conversation in the industry.

Sony themselves certainly isn’t talking about it much. Despite being more than happy to boast about how PS4 and PS4 Pro have now amassed over 50 million sales, they have yet to publicly comment on how many units PSVR has sold. Sony has previously said that sales for PSVR are “on track,” but will not explain what that means, exactly. Later, Sony’s Kaz Hirai elaborated a bit more to Daily Star Online:

“We've always said it's going to be a slow start, unfortunately, we did produce a lot of units but we ran out of stock in some retailers, but I think based on reports coming out of the holiday season, we're actually happy with the numbers.

"One of the reasons we're not talking about the numbers so much is because we don't want the numbers to take a life of their own."

The “life of their own” the numbers would take on is presumably a story about how PSVR is not exactly tearing down the house when it comes to sales. SuperData Research previously revised their estimates for 2016 sales of PSVR from 2.6 million to 750,000, which is still more than Oculus and HTC, but obviously nothing to brag about, given Sony’s silence.

Now, it's early days yet for PSVR, and it's still possible that the thing could still catch fire, but I'm still seeing all the same problems with PSVR that I see with VR as a whole (i.e. too many unresolved technical issues, with not nearly enough compelling VR-exclusive content to drive adoption), with the added problem that the PSVR package leans heavily on cameras and controlled from the aforementioned PlayStation Move... which flopped.

Is PSVR the next PS Vita? Is it doomed? Only time will tell, but... 

Let's just say I have a bad feeling about their chances.

VR is its own killer app, says head of VR firm

I guess we're already at the circling the wagons part of VR's failure to launch.

According to William McMaster, posting at The Huffington Post:

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.

Emphasis his.

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.

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.

The case for VR may be even weaker than it first appeared

From lifehacker AU:

I think we all thought racing games would be perfect in virtual-reality (AKA VR). We almost took that for granted. Actually, anything that involved sitting seemed perfect for VR.

Sitting in a mech, shooting people. Perfect for VR.

Sitting in a spaceship, shooting other spaceships. Perfect for VR.

Sitting in a racecar, racing other racecars. Perfect for VR.

It makes sense. There’s perceived issues with virtual reality as a concept. We’re all agreed that, while VR has made spectacular leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, there are still problems to be solved.

Prime among them: player movement.

How does one run in VR? How does one jump? How do we climb and how do we shoot? So many of the classic video game verbs don’t really work in VR.

Driving though. We can handle that one, right? Yes. Probably.

But a strange sensation. I’m currently playing Gran Turismo Sport. I’m playing using the PlayStation VR headset. Literally five minutes ago I was playing Gran Turismo Sport like a relatively normal person: a normal person who somehow has a PlayStation 4 Pro and a really great 4K television.

I’m still trying to work out which one I prefer.

Remember when I said that VR wasn't going to revolutionize gaming? This is why I said that. Even in a seated experience, playing a game which literally sits you in a cockpit and asks you to interact with nothing but your vehicle's controls, VR isn't better. It might be as good, but it isn't better. And at $600 a throw, it needs to be better than the alternative, not just different.

Hell, considering how many things don't really work in VR, even at $300 a throw, VR needs to blow users away when doing at least those few things that it does relatively well. But it doesn't. I've tried VR, and I can say this from experience. VR is different, it's even interesting, but it didn't blow me away. It's worth trying, but it isn't worth buying, and won't be for a long time yet.

Not that 4K displays are about to be a thing, either. For most people, 1080p will work just fine for everything, gaming included, so don't go thinking that you need a pricey 4K screen to play PS4 games. You don't. But you don't need PSVR, either, which is a problem since PSVR was the headset that VR advocates were counting on to convince the masses to join the VR revolution.

Microsoft's upcoming $300 PCVR headsets will lower the price bar for entry, it looks like they'll be locked to Windows 10 (thus limiting adoption to a maximum of 22.5% of PC users), and no more useful than any other VR headset, I wouldn't bank on them changing the game significantly, either. There are just too many problems with VR, and not enough to be gained from buying in.

Mark Serrels' lifehacker article (well worth a read, BTW, so go give it some clicks) describes this situation as, "Weird." I'd call it not to much weird, as inevitable. The only remaining question is, how long does it take the rest of the world's tech bloggers to catch up to reality?

Q: Will Microsoft's new VR headsets work with Windows 7 & 8?

We don't know what November 1st's PC market share numbers will look like, but as of October 1st, Windows 10 was only 22.53% of the PC OS market, and had actually ticked slightly backwards relative to Windows 7 compared to the previous month. That's problematic for Microsoft for any number of reasons, but here's another one that's just been added: VR.

VR is extremely prohibitive technology, with a ton of barriers to entry, not the least of which is cost. Microsoft is looking to lower the cost barrier significantly, partnering with multiple 3rd party vendors to release VR headsets for PC at a $300 price point, which will bring the cost of PCVR in line with PSVR, and possibly giving it a fighting chance to at least get started on the path to becoming a thing.

So far, so good... or better than it was, anyway. There's just one problem: Microsoft themselves.

Microsoft is all about pushing Windows 10 these days, and the PCVR headsets were announced at a Windows 10 event. VR, though, is still struggling to find mainstream acceptance on any platform, and needs to appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to have a chance at becoming established. On PC, that means Windows 7, which is still 48.27% of the market generally, and 34.72% of Steam users.

Thus, the questions:

• Will Microsoft do their best to get PCVR established by supporting these devices on Windows 7 & 8, thus undercutting their (apparently stalled) drive to push Windows 10 onto every PC on the planet? 
• Will they use PCVR to push Windows 10 instead, cutting side deals with all five of their hardware partners to keep the new VR headsets exclusive to the new OS, and adding a new barrier to VR entry in the form of a Windows 10 requirement (not free anymore, remember), even as they lower the PCVR cost barrier?
• Since HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer are all going to want to sell as many headsets as possible, would they even go along with Window 10 exclusivity, even if it means they sell half as a many PCVR headsets as they might otherwise?

These are real questions; I honestly don't know which way any of these companies are going to go.

Oculus lowers Rift's minimum hardware requirement with software update

From ars technica:

When Oculus first announced the minimum PC specs for the Oculus Rift, the headset needed an Nvidia GTX 970 equivalent and an Intel i5-4590 to run acceptably. Now without changing the hardware, Oculus has used a new software API called "asynchronous spacewarp" to officially lower that recommended spec. Today, Oculus says the Rift will run acceptably on any machine with an Nvidia 960 or greater and an intel i3-6100 (or AMD FX4350) or greater.

[...]

The spacewarp system (which is built into the Oculus runtime) takes the two previous frames generated by software, analyzes the difference, and calculates a spatial transformation that can generate a "synthetic frame" based on the current head translation and movement. While Iribe was clear that this synthetic frame system is still "no replacement for native 90 hz rendering," it does fill in the frame rate gaps on systems that are not able to hit that framerate natively.

Hence, the Oculus Rift officially supports PC hardware that's less powerful than it did before. That includes a new $499 Oculus Ready PC from CyberPowerPC and AMD. Oculus is also certifying four Oculus-ready laptops from the likes of ASUS, Alienware, Lenovo, Aorus. Iribe promised that, within a few years, there will be hundreds of laptops that meet that Oculus Ready spec. For now, though, Iribe said "PC VR is more affordable than ever.

Lowering the barrier to entry by $1000 will bring Oculus into line with PSVR in terms of cost, with a potential larger user base since more people own PCs than PS4s, which makes it, at least, competitive. It still doesn't solve the problem of VR being essentially useless, and still not worth a $600 investment ($800 with Touch controllers), but at least it doesn't require a $2000 investment, which is progress. Now they just need to bring the cost of the headset down by half, and add a bunch of high quality, highly replayable VR content, and VR might have a fighting chance to become an actual thing, rather that being just another short-lived, barely-a-fad thing.