Beginning VR Development (2015)

+1 to Kevin's note about Aframe - I've been building on it for a few months now, and can attest to it being the easiest entry point for devs with even the most basic chops. Plus Kevin and team run an awesome Slack group for devs that's very responsive.

Here's a fun showcase of aframe projects: https://github.com/aframevr/awesome-aframe#scenes

I can't wait for WebVR in Edge. They are doing it specifically to support Hololens. I recently did two projects for clients, a VR app in WebVR and an AR app in Unity. The ridiculously long compile and load times in Unity, plus the dual-headed editing experience of using the Unity editor and Visual Studio were significant impediments to the development process. In WebVR, I was significantly more productive because I could test so much faster, sometimes even tweaking settings on the fly without having to reload the app. Once Edge in Hololens gets WebVR, I can dump Unity and stick to my own framework, Primrose (https://primrosevr.com)

This looks pretty cool.

I have a question for the VR developers here. I'm interested in content for architecture and a few other things, but is anyone seriously experimenting with content other than games? Maybe it's a bit too early.

I'm loving A-Frame! I should definitely do an updated video for it, I'm still working with it a lot and I'm so impressed by how powerful it's becoming.

Right now, all tethered VR projects are arguably MS-dependent; there's no way to run those headsets on OS X or Linux, as far as I know. So it's an ecosystem thing.

And for sure, it seems that Microsoft is more interested in AR than VR. It's a big company, though. They get to do more than one thing at a time.

China is and will continue to be the largest consumer VR market for the near term (1-2 yrs). By 2018, will likely have ~4M HTC Vives live in cyber cafes, arcades and malls, and ~10M stand alone and mobile VR headsets across tier 1 cities. The rough math is about a $8B high end hardware market, $2B mid to low end mobile VR hardware market, and $2-$3B in software services and game revenues.

Almost all of the high quality, AAA games and apps will be produced by US/European studios for this period, for consumption largely by Chinese consumers.

(edited to answer your original question more directly)

People sometimes make the comparison to 3D TV, but I don't recall anyone actually wanting 3D TV other than gear geeks who buy everything to fill the existential void in their souls. Also, I don't recall demos of 3D TV making converts out of people. It was neat, but once you saw it, you figured out it wasn't going to fundamentally change how media works.

VR on the other hand: if someone hasn't already been waiting for it for decades, as soon as they yet Fruit Ninja in the Vive, they immediately demand to have it in their homes. I've been working in the VR space for almost two years now and it was just a month ago when my wife got to try Fruit Ninja that she finally understood what I've been working on. "We need this in the house" she said. "We don't have the room" I replied. Which is why my company is doing a pop-up arcade here in DC until the end of October (http://notiontheory.com/notionvr).

The first consumer devices came out and they are very expensive, require a well equipped desktop, the displays are still not that great, the availability is still low and there is not a lot of software for them. Basically everything you'd expect from the first generation. VR badly needs a killer app.