The Problem with Facebook and Virtual Reality
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Given the Facebook's generally poor history of ecosystem stewardship, I don't see why any gaming enthusiast would even want them to be the arbiter of VR content distribution. Valve is far from perfect, but I'd much rather give my money to them than Facebook.
Facebook is much better situated to work with non-game enterprises and entertainment licensing/distribution companies than Steam.
Not that I want Facebook to excel here, I don't use Facebook or Instagram and personally I find the thought of VR business meetings/news/friendships pretty distasteful, but just a 3rd party observation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/09/mark-zuck...
Maybe not 20, but having a 10 year goal and being able to give direct updates 2 years in isn't bad. :)
While Apple may have dreamed of killing the luxury market its clear they had designs on the fitness market, doubled down on the series 2 and kept marching forward.
According to the article below, an estimated 52% of Apple Watch sales in 2017 were Series 2 or earlier. So in 2017 the most appealing feature of an Apple Watch was a lower price. This is not a sustainable business model. You could find older Apple Watches during the holidays for $200. What Apple is trying to do, and I dearly hope they succeed at it, is to create a product so appealing that people will buy the latest edition at full price. I think such a success would take pressure off Fitbit's market.
My personal opinion, though, is that Fitbit's product lineup in 2018 ia better positioned than ever to compete with deeply discounted Apple Watches. Of course there's the Fitbit Versa, but smart features are even getting into the basic tracker line with Charge 3 getting app notifications, and Charge 3 Special Edition getting NFC payments.
https://investorplace.com/2018/02/holiday-apple-watch-sales-...
The problem is you can't just simply film a scene (be it porn, regular film, or some sports thing) with a couple of cameras and send it to someone to experience on a headset. People need to move their heads around, and fixed camera positions don't allow for that. When someone moves their head and their view doesn't move they start to feel sick.
There's possible ways around this. Light field tech, or CGI actors etc, but neither of those are quite there yet. As such, porn as it exists in VR today is effectively just putting a really really big screen in front of you in VR. It's not actually VR.
Then we got the iPhone.
Isn’t that obvious / circular reasoning? It’s basically saying “unless people start using VR a lot and it becomes more than a niche, it won’t help Facebook.”
* Real world space. I know personally I'd have to sell some furniture to make it practical in my apartment. I think a lot of young people are in the same boat -- if you live in a major city and you're young it's hard to really afford enough space for this kind of thing. I'm not gonna rearrange my living room for it.
* Weird movement. Like, most games are either vehicle based or use some sort of teleportation mechanic. There's a really hard limit on what you can do with VR without making a lot of people really sick; and even if you solve the motion-sickness you still have a situation where you're tethered to a specific spot with a limited amount of movement before you walk into a wall.
I don't really see the enterprise usage either. How is it that much of an improvement over a webcam and a google hangout?
Companies will and already using it for training.
There are VR experience centers.
Porn and gaming will keep people playing around with it.
It will become easier to use, with more content, lighter and cheaper.
Good VR is a crazy experience but not cheap. Let's wait a few years.
Certainly not in portable music players, smart phones, or smart watches. I have no doubt Apple could convince people it invented VR as well.
Maps, streaming music, video, voice assistant, home speakers, browsers...
If they do make a VR / AR headset, that's going to translate into better performance and/or longer battery life than their competitors.
IDC's latest report shows growth from Chinese brands (Xiaomi & Huawei) selling pretty basic wearables to Chinese audiences, but Fitbit & others have been dropping, and Garmin is only slightly up (4.1% to Apple's 38.4% YoY growth).
The big split the report cites is as markets mature they want more sophisticated wearables, which plays to ecosystem strengths of Apple. Garmin et al (even Android smartwatches) aren't likely to create / purchase the tech that can compete since Apple seems to be pouring big $ into health tech, so I'm not sure the future looks good for other brands.
I'm not fully convinced, though. Most wearable things from Apple, seem as fashion focused as anything else.
That said, my understanding is that folks that like them, love them. So not sure how the others are standing out. And will it continue.
I am also very new to this. Started using Strava and so far liking it. Bought a dedicated heart monitor. Curious if that will prove to bea complete waste someday.
My personal opinion is that unsuccessful Apple Watches have done much more harm to Fitbit than any successful one will. I'm rooting for the Series 4 to be a market hit. The unsuccessful ones so far have ended up at fire sale prices during the holidays. The last thing Fitbit needs to compete with is a $200 smart watch with an elite brand name on it.
Hopefully they'll retain full retail price for their newer models and the two companies can go back to addressing our respective market segments.
My hunch is the discounts are mostly related to the early, not-that-great revisions of Watch, and that future discounts will be less. That said, with each yearly iteration there is a supply of super old Watches that may wind up in the bargain bin.
Series 0-2 really seemed early adopter products in the mold of other 1st gen Apple products (MacBook Air, iPad, etc) and S3 is good but not great.
Series 4 definitely seems like a breakout product where capabilities hit some critical use cases - Cellular, GPS, ECG, size reduction (42mm->40mm for same screen size). The platform is definitely hitting its stride.
I wonder if/when Apple offers not only last year's model but 2 years ago model to hit a lower price point, as they do with iPhones. That's been part of Apple's strategy to avoid low-end disruption, by segmenting the market such that cheap products cannot moving up-market because of Apple's middle tier on-ramps (like iPhone SE and 6S or non-Pro iPad).
I'm not entirely sure home speakers like Echos and Google Homes are equivalent to Netbooks, but they feel like Netbooks: quite popular cheap devices whose actual use and enjoyment by consumers remains a bit of a mystery (and likely low).
I know several folks who are very tech oriented that have them, and they're used almost exclusively as voice command light switches, or infrequently timers and music. I also know regular folks who have them and they sit unused. That's just my anecdata but I have heard this echoed (heh) from many other people.
I think there's three fundamental problems:
1. Voice is not as efficient an interface for a variety of problems that visuals are better suited for.
2. Use cases where voice on a smart speaker in a home may excel are dependent on other home-related smart appliances, which do not have broad market penetration. Basically a home speaker is like talking to your home, but if it's not connected to other parts of your home, it's purpose is mostly lost.
3. There's a minimum threshold of usage under which you don't remember exactly how to use the device or what it's capable of, or make a habit of integrating it into your daily activities. This is true of all devices, but for devices that are used infrequently like voice speakers it's a real issue. So even in cases where voice is efficient, the user will fall back to a less-efficient but better understood interface, usually the smartphone.
On the last point, psychologically this is the forgetting curve, whereby things you learn that you do not reinforce through successive activities over time will fade away from memory exponentially.
There are strong use cases for voice, most notably in a car, but that's outside the scope of smart speakers.
Then, fairly recently, I switched my phone's UI over to a new language I'm learning, and it pretty much killed it for me. This time around, I just can't be arsed to learn all the exact phrases I need to know to use anything more than headline features like checking the weather and texting without taking my phone out of my pocket.*
I think it's like text adventures. Decades ago, I could deal with all the crappy parser idiosyncrasies. But not anymore. Novelty can earn you a lot of patience.
* And even that gets annoying.
-- Hey, computer, is it going to rain?
-- ~BEEP~ It is not raining where you are at this exact minute.
20 minutes later, it starts raining.And those basic functions are so useful that I use it daily and miss it outside of my home.
I also own 4 of them.
They've probably already got the AR developer mindshare, and no-one is near them for mass adoption of mobile wearable tech (watch+ear buds).
I enjoy VR a lot, but I never put on the goggles. A friend explained it to me the other day in a way I finally understood. VR requires us to disconnect from everything around us in a way that few technologies do -- that is, the cost of VR on our social interactions and situational awareness is almost total, which is a much greater price than other technologies force us to pay. They went full immersion, and it was too far... There's a certain irony that a social network bought deeply anti-social hardware. And yes, before we start talking about MPORGs, I know that could be social in VR. But I'm talking about the social costs IRL, which are much less with a technology like AR.
As far as I can tell, this is only really true for Apple Watch. I don’t think this can be called a “business model”.
I always think "some student, lucky, got unbelievable rich with a very simple product"
Zuckerberg is rich that's it.
They can afford playing with VR so they do.