🔥 The Hottest Takes on VR adoption during COVID19
It's the perfect storm for mass VR adoption but nothing is happening. Why?
Yo! Every year it feels like we’re getting closer to VR becoming a thing. Facebook and HTC have been throwing 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰 into solving huge technical challenges. AND society as we know it seems to have magically restructured itself over night to incentivize people around the world to finally give VR a try as they figure out remote work.
We’ve been in this ✨new world ✨for a few months now but VR adoption is still lacking. Here are the hottest takes from Tech Twitter on why this could be. - Brett
🤔 So… where’s the VR?
Matt Mazzeo and Kevin Rose said what we’ve all been kind of thinking:
Seriously. What the hell is going on? Half of the planet is locked up in their homes starving for entertainment and human connection but still no VR adoption.
IT’S LITERALLY THE PERFECT STORM FOR VR TO FINALLY BECOME A THING!
To be clear, it’s not like nothing has been happening in VR.
😜 Not nothing is happening
Unreal launched a super slick game engine. Thinking back to playing Golden Eye on N64 while watching this video, it’s hard to NOT believe we’re living in a simulation or that at least VR will be basically as vivid as reality in not too long.
Facebook’s Oculus Quest sales were through the roof. They also announced a bunch of cool features, opened 1,000 AR/VR roles across the company, and hired Eventbrite’s CMO to run Oculus marketing. Virtual events here we come!
Click into this thread by Tom Emrich - he shows off all of the different avatars different companies have built 👇
Apple acquired Next VR and Apple’s AR app kind of leaked.
Ok, ok. So a lot of stuff has been happening in VR. But interest is still super low:
What’s going on with the lack of consumer adoption?
📦 COVID19 messed up supply chains
I guess that’s what happens when Oculus’ entire supply chain depends on China. Glad they’re moving some production to Vietnam.
👑 Content is king and the throne is still empty
Oculus currently only has about 150 apps and Vive has only 400 apps. While there have been some successes, very few would say VR has found its “killer app.”
If we look at what made the transition to mobile so fast, we can understand why the transition to VR is so hard:
There was A LOT of content already. Websites could be easily transposed onto mobile. Not the case for VR - 2D sites just don’t work in 3D. We need brand new 3D content.
Mobile enabled utility use cases that were previously impossible, especially when GPS was introduced. Not the case for VR - there are a lot of games and not so many utility apps that are much better than just using web/mobile.
🛠 Tech is still developing
It goes without saying there’s a lot of work ahead, but we may be at an inflection point (see all the amazing tech I mentioned earlier).
🙃 VR is already here… if you change the definition
“Virtual reality” could qualify as any experience that is not part of actual reality.
This is actually the right way to think about it. Until VR headsets are ubiquitous, social VR experiences will need to focus on small groups (e.g. meetings) or allow VR and non-VR usage simultaneously.
Fortnite doesn’t have a VR play yet but it’s not hard to imagine it will soon - the experience translates over perfectly. It is also absolutely exploding - 2.7M people attended Travis Scott’s virtual concert recently.
Audio could also be a proxy for VR. As apps like Clubhouse emerge that enable audio-only chat rooms, it isn’t crazy to imagine them building parallel, integrated experiences in VR.
🏠 WFH will be a powerful driver going forward
We’re at the very beginning of a major paradigm shift towards remote work. As more companies introduce permanent work from home policies, more teams will experiment using VR to collaborate. Zuck recently said that remote work will force FB to dogfood its own VR products and make them better, faster.
Even universities may give it a try.
✌️ Thanks
See ya in the metaverse!
