56% Of VR Devs Say VR ‘Declining Or Stagnating’
from the this-is-not-the-miracle-we-were-promised dept
If you look around, virtual reality growth projections are all over the map. Most of the folks with money invested in the market see nothing but blue sky ahead. But several core problems remain: virtual reality headsets still make a lot of people sick (anywhere from 40-70% of users), and a huge swath of people simply don’t like having a giant chunk of sweaty plastic strapped to their face.
The other problem has largely been the lack of any true, unmissable “killer app.” I’m not a VR doomer; I currently own three headsets (PS5 VR2, The Oculus Quest 3S, and the Vive Index). I’ve been tinkering with the technology since I first strapped on a headset demo at E3 in 2000.
Using all three makes me sick after more than 20 minutes, no matter what kind of tricks I try. And while I’ve enjoyed some scattered game experiences on all three, the market still seems fairly awash in lower quality derivative stuff that doesn’t have a whole lot of staying power once the novelty wears off. They’re also all just generally uncomfortable to various degrees, making them ill-suited for extended use.
Developers seem to agree with the state of the sector; a recent survey of game developers found that 56 percent of them find the VR market is “currently declining or stagnating.” In part because the cost to develop these products isn’t being recouped on the other end due to limited mass market appeal for all the reasons outlined above.
The landmark moment for the industry recently was the release of the costly Apple Vision Pro, and while Apple users get defensive about the point and will immediately proclaim “it’s just a prototype!”, it landed with a giant thud. Developers tend to agree, stating Apple’s impact on the market was minimal thus far.
Then of course there’s Meta and Mark “I’m no longer political while still lobbying government for favors and kissing up to Republicans” Zuckerberg, who somehow thought he could magically translate his giant boomer-heavy sneaker advertising empire into a near-magical domination of the entirety of virtual spaces.
While the Meta headsets are decent products, the same problem remains: VR simply doesn’t have mass market appeal. You can’t under-estimate how little most of the public likes having cumbersome, dorky plastic strapped to their face.
A lot of the problem translates into the fact that the technology (battery life and size, computing scale and power) simply isn’t where it needs to be for AR/VR to live up to the hype and break through to the mainstream. For mass adoption the technology needs to be seamless, minimalistic, and utterly unobtrusive, not whatever this is supposed to be:
From there you need to develop a groundbreaking software ecosystem and a compilation of near-magical, non-vomit inducing killer apps that justify the price tag. Preferably with minimal walled gardens and annoying limits. Eventually somebody will create the near-perfect device and ecosystem, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, despite all of his money and effort and mid-life crisis fashion rebranding efforts, it probably won’t be Mark Zuckerberg.
Like LLMs (“AI”) there’s just a ton of potential in virtual and augmented reality that goes well beyond pretending to be Batman. Unfortunately, VC hucksters once again let the apple cart get ahead of the horse, flooding the market and press with mindless hype and unrealistic expectations. It will probably take another 5-10 years for reality and technology to finally catch up.
Filed Under: AR, augmented reality, developers, gaming, mark zuckerberg, metaverse, simulation sickness, virtual reality, vr
Companies: meta
Comments on “56% Of VR Devs Say VR ‘Declining Or Stagnating’”
Quality software needs to support the hardware.
If VR wants to take take off, it needs good quality software to back the hardware. The downside is that the quality software is short in supply, too many releases are “tech demo” oriented, not “final product” releases.
Vive Index?
What’s a Vive Index?
I myself have a Valve Index.
I think this is too timid a criticism. V.R. makes for some cool movies and books—though, as is often the case, the people that end up trying to make it into reality seem to have somehow missed the obvious dystopian themes of most of those stories. And they’ll read stuff like your comment, and add a fan to combat sweat, maybe make it slightly smaller and lighter…
Two problems here. One, that actually seems to have resolved your earlier criticisms of “giant”, “sweaty”, and “strapped”, and you’re still not happy. Two, “unobtrusive” is in direct conflict with the core idea of virtual reality: immersion (which, taken to its logical conclusion, requires bascially all human senses to be obstructed).
So, I have to wonder: is this really something people want, or just something they think they want? Movie theaters experimented with things such as vibration, water/odor sprays, interactivity, and 3-D vision. People were excited, and then they mostly got bored; you won’t find most of that stuff outside theme park rides anymore. Even if someone does “create the near-perfect device and ecosystem”, that doesn’t imply wide-spread popularity.
Tech Bros Gone Wild!
VR, like AI and like crypto (mostly) is the result of people with technical skills making the gigantic mistake of thinking not only that they’re the smartest ones in the room (they’re not) but that the public wants fake reality, fake people, and fake money. And some do — but not many, and they certainly don’t want the laughably incompetent bullshit that these tech bros are peddling.
But of course VCs are willing to throw money at this because they don’t mind doing risky or even stupid things, and because they have FOMO the next dot-com like boom.
We — society — don’t need any of this crap. We need technical innovation in a number of areas, but the things we need are (a) hard and (b) boring, so of course Tech Bros, who are driven their colossal egos and equally massive inferiority complexes, don’t want to work on hard, boring things. They want headlines and fanboys and interviews and all that things that they desperately hope will fill the void in their lives where an actual functional literate educated person might have been.
And so now we have billions wasted on trash that will make the world worse — already has. (I said “likely” about crypto above because while idiot tech bros are pushing it the loudest proponents and users are criminals. That’s why crypto exists, so that rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and terrorists can use it.)
Re:
I see a lot of foaming at the mouth, but few cogent arguments in what you posted.
Don’t remember seeing you arguing against virtual reality before it appeared on the market. If you were prophetic enough to argue “we should not do this thing”, you should really take your story to AITA. And if you weren’t, then welcome to the real world, where we do a whole lot of crap, trying to find the things that will be good.
Again, welcome to the real world. We need air, water, shelter. We don’t need electric lightbulbs, automobiles, or blogs like this one. But they make life better in some ways (and worse in others). Overall, we – society – have decided to keep them. Same with crypto.
Those technical innovations you say are (a) hard and (b) boring? Can you guess why you don’t hear about them regularly on the news? And yet somehow they keep coming? C’mon, guess.
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Of all the useless crap being peddled about the world today, you decided to pick upon virtual reality. Interesting.
Will the VR headsets eventually find a place in the attic next to the Quadraphonic and thigh master?
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That shows a deep misunderstanding of what skill sets are good for. Do you also go and scream at astronomers for wasting their time staring at stars and planets billions of miles away instead of curing cancer?
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And with the cost of living still going up, that tag becomes harder and harder to justify.
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Nothing is justifiable then, as the cost of living has never done anything but go up.
But, what about Facebook Horizon?!
Joke aside, I think that one of the real problem is that a lot of people have heard about AR/VR but have never experienced it, or not on a regular basis.
The technology has changed a lot from the first Oculus dev kit ten years ago and has slowly became something acceptable (i.e. not being sick after 30s).
No technology needs to be useful to get a market share, people can always find use of it, even some specific use cases, but as long as this is not portable (and just putting in on our pocket, just like a phone) and be about to use it anywhere, and so, showing to friends and family, it dooms to be a nerdy maybe corporate device.
VR is the cold fusion of user experiences. A bold utopian future is just around the corner, if you believe hard enough.
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i think you mean “fusion”. Cold fusion was never a thing.
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Woosh.
According to various Pancake-screen sellers VR died in 2019 and there have essentially been NO new developments OR new software since then.
It’s basically BS, lies and outright fraud by TV manufacturers terrified of VR.
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🤣
Apple’s headset wasn’t a gaming device. Never intended to be.
And this fake-ass “survey” just claims it is.
Why don’t they also claim other unrelated stuff ‘somehow’ proves VR is dead.
“Most brain surgeons say they don’t play steam VR games whilst operating – proving VR is dead” etc.
This entire article is negative clickbait, because positive news doesn’t sell.
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Apples headset has no particular or meaningful use case, and the only successful-ish use case so far is Gaming. Since Apple has failed to actually develop a compelling use case outside of gaming, that’s where it’s evaluated.
Gimmicks just aren't Enough
There’s yet to be a “must have” app for VR as it exists now. There are neat, gimmicky apps for folks who already have a VR headset.
But there’s yet to be any killer app that I need to buy a headset for.
I like the concept of the Apple Vision Pro; I just don’t have $3.5k to drop on a headset, when I could spend that on a nice gaming rig instead.
Heck, I already have a Valve Index. I’d use it more, if more games supported VR. I’d mod the games I do have to support it, but with all of the more recent games being live service, I’d be risking bans doing so.
AR Glasses are going to have their moment much sooner than VR glasses at this rate. I love my Viture glasses.
It doesn’t stop the wannabe censors coming up with ridiculous ideas for censorship based on the possibility that VR might take off.
Video games
Sorry if this is random, but just to offer that VR video games is the obvious killer app that no one has seriously addressed.
I’m one of the few that got Google’s Cardboard VR viewer that let me slip my Switch console on it and play Zelda in decent 3D VR. Year later Google abandoned that notion as well as Nintendo. It was a great idea but the controller and 540 screen door resolution were it’s downfall.
Fast forward 10 years and I’m certain Nintendo’s Tears of the Kindom would be a monster hit on Occulus/Meta. It’s a surprising missed opportunity as I see my 9 year old nephew slap on his Quest 2 with no hesitation and play Minecraft in VR.
While I don’t disagree with most of the article, a couple of things.
First, you said:
And then you said:
The latter was followed by a photo of what appears to be an AR device that, frankly, is pretty seamless, minimalistic, and unobtrusive as far as AR can be. They look like regular sunglasses/glasses, albeit on the thicker side in terms of the frame, but still within what non-AR/VR glasses that already exist look like. I have no idea how functional the AR part actually is, but in terms of the device’s external features, it frankly doesn’t seem that bad, especially compared to most contemporaries (like the aforementioned Apple Vision Pro). It certainly doesn’t look cumbersome, at least no more than a pair of glasses or sunglasses already is.
Maybe it’s a bit dorky, but it’s at least a step in the right direction, surely; it definitely isn’t worse as a fashion statement compared to the other, incredibly bulky headsets on the market. Why you act as though it’s completely missing the reason people aren’t adopting AR or VR headsets is beyond me, at least given the reasons you gave.
Second, there are a few reasons I think you missed for why AR headsets, specifically, haven’t really taken off.
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Those glasses aren’t actually anything. They are vapor wear (ha!), and until they deliver in their rather ambitious specifications, should be thought of as aspirational. Which is the authors point.
The only way you can make those look even remotely stylish, is to place them on the face of human that triggers the uncanny valley reflex in people. That is to say that they are ugly enough they could be used for birth control.
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I’m sure that won’t be a problem at all. One could say the same thing about walking around while staring at a phone, rubbing and “pinching” it. Or about playing Pokémon Go. History shows it takes less than a year for such things to be considered “normal”.
iPhones have had Siri for 13 years now, and people do use it in public.
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Those people should be placed in woodchoppers, feet first.
If you code it, they will come...
While the motion sickness and the clunky nature are certainly problems I think the biggest issues are two-fold: Price and purpose.
People will shell out hundreds or even thousands on hardware in order to play or experience entertaining stuff, as evidenced by the continuing existence and highly profitable gaming industry both PC and console, but…
… this is strongly dependent upon there being a reason to shell out that sort of money, something that you can only get with the PC/console and that’s worth the initial investment, and so far most VR content seems to still be in the ‘tech demo’ stage where to the extent that something is truly groundbreaking it’s likely to be rather shallow/short, or VR is treated as just a gimmick that’s enough of a selling point on it’s own with no need to have an engaging experience.
Knock the price down so it’s more affordable and give people not just a good reason but a number of them to shell out the money and I can see the tech advancing past the ‘niche interest’ category it’s currently stuck in.
This is the real problem. It’s all well and good talking about potential, but people need the reason to spend the extra cash. A couple of decent games isn’t enough reason for people to spend the same as they would on another console, and let’s face it nobody outside of Meta’s labs wants to virtually be near the people they work with. A normal console and Zoom/Teams are perfectly fine for these needs.
There are some edge cases where it’s very useful, but for the average person it’s not important. It’s like the Kinect debacle on XBox overall – some researchers found it a very useful tool, but it was a failure when they tried forcing every XBox One to add $100 to have one included.
Maybe something will appear, but if you want tech to go mass market you have to have a reason for people to buy it, and while it’s generally seen as an optional add on with few practical uses, that’s where it’s going to stay.
On walls, floors, and the killer app
the first issue with VR is that absent a swimming pool or a parachute simulator that holds you up mid-air, there’s this floor that generally supports people and usually nearby walls that you don’t want to run into. So you want to do VR, what can I do from a chair where I don’t have to balance or concern myself with obstacles, such as people??? This way lies a class of killer apps.
Second, I am of the school that AR killer apps will come first, and the AR app of most interest is basically a google glass setup for someone doing something they need help with, and a second person looking at a screen and marking up the scene for the first person to help with the task. Heck, we already have that in the form of pokemon hunting…except that it’s phones instead of google glass like AR/heads up display screens.
Third thought: My car windshield is an interesting display device for AR…hmmm…especially if I want to see where my unfamiliar turn is or track street names.
“Using all three makes me sick after more than 20 minutes, no matter what kind of tricks I try.”
Maybe try just one at a time? I find two is my max.
VR content sucks to make
Insider information:
1. VR sickness has never been solved. 2/3 people get VR sick. Half of those get VERY sick. Many employees can’t even test their own work in-game because they will have to stop working for the day and lay down.
Handheld PC’s were stagnating then valve released the steam deck, valve are working on a standalone VR that will be the next leap forward, they have the hardware know how and the software to back it up. Trust in valve and Gabe