IF YOU believe the hype, 2016 is the year of virtual reality. Long thought to be a technological dead end, VR began its comeback in 2012, when an upstart called the Oculus Rift took the internet by storm with its promises of a fully immersive environment.
Tech giants scrambled to make their own headsets – Sony’s PlayStation VR, released this week, is the latest. Now that these devices are finally on the market, we’re starting to figure out how they might fit into our lives.
Facebook, which bought Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, has anointed VR as the technology that will supersede smartphones as the primary medium for digital life. “We are here to make VR the next major computing platform,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an Oculus conference last week. But it seems the general public isn’t buying into this brave new world – sales of high-end goggles are tiny and hardly growing. Could it be that while people are happy to paw at a screen, they don’t want one inches from their eyeballs?
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VR has burned out before. In the 1990s, bulky VR booths started , and Nintendo launched its Virtual Boy headset in 1995. But the bubble quickly burst as people found the creaking tech to be a lacklustre experience, and the Virtual Boy was discontinued after a year of disappointing sales (see chart).
“VR has burned out before – in the 1990s people found the creaking tech to be a lacklustre experience“
This time is different, says at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “For the first time, all the major players are invested in the field – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook.”
Unlike in the 1990s, the gear really works, and as of this year, consumers can buy it. Modern VR runs the gamut from cheap and cheerful viewers to expensive hardware dedicated to delivering true immersion.
Purpose-made headsets are on the top end of this spectrum, with high-quality optical components and sensors that track the wearer’s movements and replicate them in the virtual environment. The HTC Vive and Facebook’s Oculus Rift are the two main players in this full-blown experience – which enthusiasts call “real” VR. They cost about £600, plus another £900 for a computer with enough power to drive the graphics.
The opposite end of the spectrum is a smartphone strapped to your face. These viewers can be very basic: Google has shipped millions of units called Cardboard, which is just two plastic lenses in a cardboard housing for the phone, sold cheap or even given away.
Others, like Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream, cost less than £100 and integrate some of the features of pricier headsets, like head tracking, providing reasonable VR experiences when paired with a top phone.
But people aren’t using their phones to explore Zuckerberg’s virtual future. They’re just watching fancy videos.
Niche thing
It’s a growing market for directors like Sebastian Hagemeister. Based in London, he flies all over the world filming 360-degree video, promos and adverts designed to be viewed in virtual reality. A whole industry has sprung up making expensive content for platforms that most of us have never used and are only just starting to get our hands on.
For that reason, Hagemeister says most of his videos are viewed on normal computer screens through Facebook or YouTube.
“I don’t have any stats, but I’m pretty sure that people watching these on the headsets are very much a minority at the moment, and will be for quite some time,” says Hagemeister. “It’s quite a geeky niche thing.”
Still, at the bottom end of the market, VR viewer sales are on the up. “In the second quarter of 2016 over a million Cardboard units shipped in China,” says Tom Mainelli at IDC, a market research company in Framingham, Massachusetts. Samsung’s Gear VR is bundled with the company’s latest smartphone, and Facebook says 1 million people have used the device to access its content.
Google also plans to bundle its Daydream viewer with every new Pixel phone it sells – a good strategy, says Mainelli. “VR is not going to be as big as smartphones, but by attaching itself to smartphones you can get to a big number of people.”
In contrast, sales of dedicated headsets are flatlining. Neither HTC nor Facebook are open about the number they’ve sold, although Zuckerberg did admit to a “slow start” for the Oculus Rift.
That’s in line with data from game marketplace Steam, which conducts a monthly of its users’ hardware. Figures for VR headsets have remained effectively flat for months, with 0.31 per cent of Steam users reporting the hardware in September. It’s perhaps no surprise, given that VR lacks a “killer app” to drive hardware sales, as Wii Sports did for the Wii.
This week’s release of the PlayStation headset is the last ray of light for “full” VR. Somewhere between the impressive capabilities of Vive and Oculus, and weaker phone-powered VR, Sony’s headset will run off the PlayStation 4. With millions of consoles out there, it can plug into a ready-made market that neither Oculus nor HTC has.
Even if full-blown VR does go mainstream, how will it be used? Hollerer suggests that homes may have an alcove for occasional VR use. Live sports could also drive adoption, if broadcasters get on board. “Think about the ability to be courtside in a basketball game,” says Mainelli. “You can see how advertisers would see the upside.”
Ultimately though, VR’s inherent effect of shutting out the world limits its potential. This has led industry observers to suggest that augmented reality, rather than virtual reality, is a more legitimate place to look for Zuckerberg’s “next platform”.
Instead of immersing the viewer in a digital world, augmented reality overlays the physical world with digital information. “I happen to think that AR is the real game changer and is going to have a much bigger impact on consumers and business,” says Mainelli (see “Life, overlaid“).
“We wouldn’t have thought 10 years ago that people would be walking around staring at small screens“
Zuckerberg may have reached the same conclusion – at the conference last week he pointed the way to a future, a mere 10 or 15 years away, where simple glasses can deliver both immersive VR and AR experiences.
Makers of these devices are all essentially second-guessing the same thing – what comes next in society’s ongoing shift towards merging digital information from screens with our daily lives. Bulky headsets may not win us over, but it seems inevitable that we will keep reducing the distance between us and the digital worlds we increasingly inhabit.
“We wouldn’t have thought 10 years ago that people would be walking around staring at small screens while they’re walking,” says Höllerer. “But they do, because the benefits are there.”
For VR to work, it will have to get cheaper and easier to use, making the tech of the Oculus and Vive more accessible to the masses. The technology will also need to offer tangible benefits, not merely port functions from old screens to new. Whether that is possible before the bubble bursts again remains to be seen.
Life, overlaid
This year saw a craze for a new kind of reality – Pokémon Go, the first augmented reality (AR) application to achieve mass appeal. The smartphone app, which lets players hunt and catch creatures overlaid on an image of the physical world, has been downloaded more than 500 million times.
Pokémon Go is the most basic AR possible, because it doesn’t place critters in the real environment in a particularly sophisticated way. But for many people, hunting Pokémon has been their first example of engaging with a world that interweaves the physical and digital.
Industry watchers such as Tom Mainelli of IDC, a market research company in Framingham, Massachusetts, think AR will be far bigger than pure virtual reality and will be used more by businesses and consumers (see main article).
Seamless experience
Why? Because in order to really make an impact on our lives, digital realities need to offer a seamless and immediate experience comparable to smartphones. That means less strapping yourself into an isolating headset, and more giving you a new set of eyes that can see both digital and physical worlds.
“Augmented reality has the potential to be that next platform,” says Mainelli.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Reality check”
