Lately there are a lot of us talking about VR or working with VR (I know, I haven't tell anything about what I'm doing with it yet :P).
I just want to share some thoughts about my point of view regarding how I see the market right now and trying to foresee what could come in the following years. To talk about this I need to talk about Google, Oculus (and similar), and some development tools.
I see there are two main branches on the VR big players. Those creating each time more powerful visors, with better sound and more natural interfaces. And those trying to use smartphones as visors, trading off a lot of power in exchange of portability.
In the first branch you find Oculus, HTC Vive, and similar. Visors with better resolution, better sound, better input devices, etc. They bet is to push the state of the art in VR technology, their market is the people with enough money to pay for "immersive" experiences looking to have the most realistic experience. We know Oculus is already taking some steps to have some exclusive content for their visor, and probably their competition will try to do the same (if they haven't already). For me, it looks like they are imitating the consoles war.
In the latest I/O (i.e. 2016) Google presented Daydream, and they told us exactly what they are trying to do: they are trying to make Android the VR platform. You don't need to be a genious to notice that if this works, Google has enough money to become the VR leader in the world, if they have the right platform with enough content and users, then it wouldn't be a problem to make a great powerful visor if they want. However, Google isn't trying to reach the niche market of the current Visors, they know it is not enough for them, they are actually pushing the market to actually have something to become the size they want, this needs more and better content, better smartphones (Daydream ready), and more people that have tried good VR so they know they want it.
Finally, the development tools. Unity and Unreal are happy to be tools that need just a little tunning to be the main development tool for the relative new and not so overcrowded as the indie games market.
So, there is a lot of people making (or considering to make) VR, development tools for it, hardware and platforms... are we missing something? yes! customers. Again, Google knows it, maybe others too, but Google is the one doing something about it, in my opinion, they were doing it in the "nice" way with Cardboard, and now in the "business" way with Daydream. And this is the point I was trying to reach.
The current market is a niche, many people talks about the "one time experience" of VR, i.e. for many people it's OK to use a visor to check a cool app, but for them it is not in any way the next big thing we think it is, and the reason is that so far the market seems to be following very simple ways of using VR: video games (yay), movies, videos, pictures... I'm not saying it's not good, but there is a lot of innovation that can be done with this technology, but we may need more people to play the "nice" way if we want the people to have enough reasons to want VR.
Let's see how things go, probably many big players still have some nice things to show, just let's hope we don't end up in a ill patent war, but with something that could help all of us to make some other nice things, because we still have a lot to do in order to make VR attractive for more people.
Finally, the development tools. Unity and Unreal are happy to be tools that need just a little tunning to be the main development tool for the relative new and not so overcrowded as the indie games market.
So, there is a lot of people making (or considering to make) VR, development tools for it, hardware and platforms... are we missing something? yes! customers. Again, Google knows it, maybe others too, but Google is the one doing something about it, in my opinion, they were doing it in the "nice" way with Cardboard, and now in the "business" way with Daydream. And this is the point I was trying to reach.
The current market is a niche, many people talks about the "one time experience" of VR, i.e. for many people it's OK to use a visor to check a cool app, but for them it is not in any way the next big thing we think it is, and the reason is that so far the market seems to be following very simple ways of using VR: video games (yay), movies, videos, pictures... I'm not saying it's not good, but there is a lot of innovation that can be done with this technology, but we may need more people to play the "nice" way if we want the people to have enough reasons to want VR.
Let's see how things go, probably many big players still have some nice things to show, just let's hope we don't end up in a ill patent war, but with something that could help all of us to make some other nice things, because we still have a lot to do in order to make VR attractive for more people.
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