Content would be incredibly hard to produce for it though.
It is certainly nothing like as hard as game development, but for people coming from TV/movie land the whole software and interaction aspect (even just moving the head) confuses them.
If anything resolving 3D audio was the hard part, by which I mean most subject to being misunderstood. (Try explaining to a media creative type that crossfading binaural mixes of two orientations does not create a valid intermediate new binaural mix).
Source: I worked on several notable stereoscopic VR productions.
I’ve heard people say “wow VR porn must be amazing”
I’ve heard people say it exists
I don’t think I have ever heard the name of a single title, porn or otherwise. I also don’t feel like I have heard any claims that it’s actually considered added value.
The engines are really good. In fact, I think that a couple of movies have been made, using Unreal.
Those are coming together with AR.
That said, advertisers could easily kill this, and there's so much money in ads, that I don't know if there's any way to prevent that.
Yeah, it's expensive, but pro anything is expensive. I have friends that have made movies, and have given me some insight into the process. It's not really something that I think I'd enjoy.
What will kill it, will be cheap-ass ads, splattered around a high-quality scene.
I'll take "Things that never stopped the Internet from succeeding" for $400, Alex.
For advertisers, the only metric is "$". Others may have different priorities.
But you have a point. A stroll around the Ginza District at night, shows how advertising can actually become a cultural heritage.
And I mean... I own a Quest 1. I've not seen an advertisement anywhere besides the "Store" and "Browser" apps to my knowledge. If you want to immerse yourself in a scene, nothing stops you. There's probably a reality where Roblox-style VR is supported by ads, but that will exist on all headsets. The only way to guarantee advertisement becoming the norm is to lock out competitors and make it impossible for Open Source software to compete. Apple is quite good at that last part.
Just consider how much live action content an unskilled teen can produce vs how much CG content they can produce. The labor differential is massive. Making movies is hard but making immersive CG is on a different level.
As far as democratizing 3d content creation, I think live action depth aware capture on the iPhone is the immediate path forward.
The current serious producers have built their own cameras, but these tend to come with an expensive pipeline of compositors to make up for a lack of willingness to automate position and color calibration.
The problem, as I alluded to earlier, is creatively it is far closer to theater than cinema, and many people want to make cinema.
Big budget productions companies (like, you know, Apple) are already shooting with fancy cameras and their 3D pipeline is pretty capable of generating stereoscopy.
Every 3D movie released for 3DTVs is waiting for re-encoding to 4K+. Free money for distribution companies.
Porn companies are the main mover in this domain. VHS, Bluray, and now headsets.
And there are lot of tricks you can use. Like use ML model to estimate depth of any 2D movie.
But real spatial capture and rendering is going to be where the headset will truly shine.