When will VR reach mass-market?
The current VR cycle started in 2012 with the Oculus Kickstarter. Then Valve and Facebook started investing too. Speculation and hype started running wild on when VR would reach mass-market.
2016 came and the high-end headsets launched. The dream was more alive than ever. This was going to change the world. But it didn’t.
Only Sony has released sales numbers for their PSVR. They have sold 2 million headsets by the end of 2017 and 3 million by August 2018. If you keep in mind its limitations, these are actually pretty good numbers. There’s some speculation about the sales figures for Oculus and HTC. Sales didn’t pick up pace until they finally dropped their prices. but still, they seem to have sold 1–2 million headsets since release. That makes a rough estimate of 5–7 million high-end headsets in the wild.
And we haven’t even mentioned attachment rates. Limited content and the friction to get into VR is limiting repeated use of VR headsets. It takes me about 5 minutes to get into VR. I need to set up everything in the living room, and there may even be other people in that space, so I can’t use it frequently.
This was going to change the world instantly. But it didn’t.
Hype was way out the roof, but even more conservative expectations weren’t met. Many VR studios had to shut down and VC investments for VR startups became hard to find. 2017 brought a VR winter in the media that continued throughout 2018. Many were writing VR off. What happened?
As I’ve mentioned before, price and content are the main issue with convincing people to buy headsets.
Gaming content has improved a lot as there are now widely popular games. Some have even reached the mainstream like Beat Saber and VR Chat. Sony and Oculus are investing on content and in 2018 it has started to pay off.
Oculus spent most of 2017 slaying the price of the Rift until it reached $400 where sales started to pick up pace. HTC and Playstation followed suit. Successful discount seasons like Black Friday proved that initial prices were too high. But you still need an expensive $1000 computer which almost no one can afford or is willing to buy.
We also have mobile VR, which is a ~$100 headset that plugs into your phone. The Samsung Gear VR has been the most successful headset to date with over 5m devices sold. But that was mostly due to Samsung giving them away with smartphones and the attachment rate was subpar. Daydream (Google’s platform) was even worse off. They were 3DOF headsets which limited the content, and people weren’t keen on spending a lot of money either. Mobile VR was ultimately a flop.
Then came standalones in 2018. Their main purpose is to reduce the friction to get people into VR at a good price. You put the headset on and your in another world. No external device and no wires. The Oculus Go was cheap and moderately successful but the content wasn’t good enough. In the end, it’s a 3DOF device with limited possible interactions.
So, if current headsets haven’t been enough, what do we need?
I wrote this tweet a few weeks ago which is what triggered this blog post:
Let’s start with the hardware:
- It needs to be cheap. $400 at most seems to be what the market agrees to be a good price. And that’s $400 including everything included.
- No friction to get into VR. Standalones make this possible by removing the wires and requiring no setup. Existing headsets are still too uncomfortable to wear them for long periods of time. We also need to remember that VR takes you away from the physical world. This is troublesome as you can trip over anything and you can’t interact with people around you. You also look weird while wearing a headset and interacting with things others can’t see.
- Day-long battery life. At least something as good as existing smartphones and tablets. Current batteries last as long as a regular person can wear a headset without strains anyway. We need to improve battery alongside comfort if we expect people to engage with VR for something more than a limited short-form experience.
- Resolution high enough to read text comfortably. This is often overlooked. For people to invest a hefty sum in a headset they need to be able to do everything they can do in their phones or tablets. That means being able to read text. Some newer headsets like the HTC Vive Pro and Samsung Odyssey+ have higher resolution which improves text legibility.
The community is generally excited about the Oculus Quest (Spring 2019). It provides most of the improvements I mentioned above. It’s the first standalone 6DOF headset with popular existing content available on day 1. It also provides a high resolution like the HTC Vive Pro. And for $400, all included. It promises to be a big push forward for the VR industry. I agree with that statement, but it’s still not enough to be mass-market. Resolution is still far from human vision and it’s still heavy with a 2–3h battery life. You also look weird wearing it and can’t interact with your physical surrounding.
And what about the software side?
Most of the content coming for the Oculus Quest is gaming. It’s hard to convince everyone to spend $400 on something that’s only to play games. You’re also competing with existing gaming platforms which have far better content.
We need more mainstream applications: social experiences, browsers, email clients, creation tools… Things is, text input in VR is crazy bad. If you find typing on a phone a pain, wait til you try VR. The best keyboard right now transforms your controllers into drum sticks. Even if you learnt how to to be efficient, it would only be as good as typing with 2 fingers. Typing passwords or URLs is a hassle, and don’t even get my started if you want to write an email, send a message to a friend or write a blog post. VR needs great text input.
If we get text input right, VR will be able to substitute phones and tablets. It also offers larger and multiple screens and all the amazing 3D capabilities VR was born for. If we get great text input, we’ll be able to make VR a mass-market device.
Even though content has improved, we still don’t have a so-called killer app. Understanding the existing limitations I mentioned above is important. There’s something I call the Friction — Killer App Scale. The more friction a technology requires, the more critical the killer app needs to be. A person has to circumvent the limitations, so the app has to be important for their life. This is the reason that new technologies are used in the enterprise sector.
The Oculus Quest makes great strides in reducing the friction for people to use VR. The next major goal is to figure out text input. We fix text input, together with comfort and battery life, and we bring the friction down to the lower left hand corner of the graph. This opens the flood gates for developers to create a wave of killer apps.
VR has now been around for 6 years and it hasn’t lived up to its hype. We now recognise its current hardware limitations: price, friction and content. The Oculus Quest brings progress on all 3 fronts. To that I add that text readability and input are critical for mainstream use of VR headsets. Text input is unsolved and it’s the missing piece for VR to substitute phones and tablets. We’ll make VR a mass-market platform once the friction is low enough for consumer killer apps to appear.
