The Dangers of Setting VR Expectations and Valuations Too High
forbes.com
forbes.com
Oculus has already shipped >200k dev kits. Assuming Oculus and Valve/HTC ship at least a million (>5X the number of enthusiast/dev kits), the 3 million total would have to mean Sony only gets a <5% attachment rate. Not likely.
Sony's headset will be competitive to with the Rift recommended PC specs (a GTX 970), even though it has way less power: the PSVR is primarily targeted at 60Hz reprojected to 120Hz, and it has a 1080p display that is RGB stripe instead of the Rift and Vive's pentile-esque 90Hz 1200x1080x2 displays. These two combine to mean PSVR will only have to push half as many pixels, for similar quality levels (PSVR actually has more subpixels than Rift and Vive; they throw away 33% of the subpixels you spent gobs of GPU power rendering). You aren't going to play games with fidelity of console TV stuff, but you aren't going to at the Oculus recommended spec either.
He doesn't explain why he thinks it will take until 2018 for Sony to get into the millions. We know the PSVR is design is finalized. As long as it is out significantly before Christmas 2016, they should get into the millions much earlier than 2018.
1 - https://gridjumper.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/picture-5.png
I have a Vive dev kit and it is amazing, but I agree the amount space is going to be an issue. However, since Oculus and Sony aren't going to support the same freeform movement, there will be plenty of experiences that get ported to Vive that don't need a lot of space either.
I haven't found gorilla arm to be an issue; most interfaces seem to be going with laser-pointer style where you don't have to have your arms out. It's more like a gyromouse. I've had no issues with pretty long sessions inside Tilt brush, which is probably the most demanding in that regard.
Several new locomotion techniques are coming on line from all the experimenting that are solving the sea-sickness issue without having to dedicate an entire room to physically walking around. Here's one of the most promising ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKnM5gC-XpY , seems to have pretty much fixed things for sensitive people.
The initial Oculus release with gamepad only and no motion controllers is going to be a bit of a let-down; you are right that just playing the same games seated with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard in VR probably isn't going to be enough for it to be a mass phenomenon.
Attach rates for hardware add-on to a video game console are historically horrible. They might be lucky to get 5%.
And for gaming, it's always about the killer app. Given that we're still in a learning curve for VR game development, it's not unreasonable to say there won't be one next year.
The main way I see it not happening is if it doesn't make it out in time for holidays with enough in stock.
Take drones as an example. For years, people were buying them purely on novelty value. But now you can see actual commercial demand in agriculture and in filmmaking.
As a counterexample, take Google Glass. Tens or hundreds of thousands of units sold. But every time I asked somebody what they were using it for, I got answers like "it's so cool!" Once the novelty value wore off, they got put in drawers and never used again.
As a third, take smartwatches. When the Pebble came out, it was all novelty hype. But gradually people found uses. It's not a massive revolution, but there's enough of a market there for a small number of companies to have modest success.
So far, everything I've seen for VR mirrors the '90s wave of VR enthusiasm: lots of "erhmegerd 3D" and "think of the future", but no evidence of workaday value. People have theories of what that will be, but no proof. It could be too early, of course; sometimes technologies take time to find markets. But by now with hundreds of thousands of devices in circulation, I'd expect to see some proof from early commercial adopters. Is it out there?
It's like the difference between the color and black and white portions of the Wizard of Oz.
As an example, consider 3D movies and television sets. For a while, many vendors were touting them as the next big thing, and you could find plenty of people who'd talk about well done 3D as an amazing experience. But now it's the rare movie that bothers with 3D, and manufacturers have mostly given up. There just was never the significant consumer enthusiasm that there was around, say, color film and color television.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
[2] And it was the best thing ever, but that's not enough to change the world.
Did you use google glass and have you used VR?
I have used neither Glass nor the latest generation of VR. Which I'm ok with. If I did, I might or might not think them cool, but that's irrelevant. I'm not in any of the plausible market niches for early-stage VR, so my personal experience won't say anything useful. The kind of evidence I'm asking for here is not whether somebody thinks something is amazing. It is whether they are finding it useful enough on a day-to-day basis that they are paying for it and re-paying for it.
If they are, that's great. And if not, well, maybe we just aren't there yet. It can take time for technologies to find their feet. But given that I'm getting a host of replies with anything but what I'm looking for, that seems telling to me.
Brewster stereoscopes [1] were a smash hit at the Great Exhibition of 1851 [2]. 250,000 were sold in short order. But they fell out of fashion soon enough.
3D has a long history of being an exciting innovation that will change everything. But so far, the most successful and long-lasting stereoscopic product is the ViewMaster, which has become a sort of eternal novelty.
I'm not a fan of Facebook's mass consumer adoption strategy, I don't think it's ready.
I am very long VR over time but I think we are at the Palm Pilot stage not the iphone stage. Metaphors are not precise in these matters but perhaps that one is useful to you.
The input devices are a huge part of the story for VR and the 3d/VR wand controllers ie Oculus Touch and the Steam Lighthouse controllers are only in the hands of a few hundred people at this point.
We've had 2-3 years of tens of thousands of headsets but terrible input solutions so far.
That has produced shoddy demos and kiosk applications because of the lack of good input into the 3d environment.
Facebook is doubling down on this terribleness by going to mass consumer launch using xbox one controllers.
As others have mentioned, VR is transformative when the input solution fits.
Elite Dangerous with HOTAS controllers. Several driving games with steering wheels, Dirt Rally is great fun. Amazing experiences for more serious simulation games.
With proper 3d wands there are a number of new serious game types that will be very compelling but the content needs to be designed from scratch with VR input in mind.
As the serious creative applications (ie Blender or Maya3d, CAD/engineering,medical/science visualization, music etc.) actually get accurately tracked 3d wands I think we will see some transformative creation experiences.
After laying out vertexes in a properly designed VR application I think people won't go back, for example.
Trading desks and financial sectors probably have a lot of territory to explore as the screen pixel density improves.
TLDR; The money in VR is largely seeking AngryBirdsVR but I don't think that's going to happen soonish.
The Palm Pilot is an interesting example, but as somebody who had one, they were actually getting used. I used mine daily. When I broke my first, I bought a second. There was also quite a lot of third-party software, including a robust commercial market. E.g.:
https://web.archive.org/web/19991003055719/http://www.zenith...
Based on your example, I would say that VR is even pre-PalmPilot.
It's still a territory for people building the future or for those wanting to peek at it.
I think that long term, VR will be huge, but I expect slow growth, agreeing with this article.