NEW REALITY’S VIRTUALLY HERE
Convention shows VR finally on the rise
Years after being introduced with much hype and fanfare and then labeled a flop, virtual reality adoption and software development continues to grow and keep marching on, game developers in town for the PAX East convention said yesterday.
“There’s enough of an audience of people that are doing VR that you could make money, and that’s when developers start jumping in,” said Steve Arnold, head of Oculus Studios. “Entertainment, news, working experiences, those are starting to come along now that an audience has been built around it.”
Oculus Studios, part of the Facebook-owned VR firm Oculus, helps and funds game developers.
Yesterday, Oculus showed off a group of new games, including a robot fighting game, Vacation Simulator, a quirky game where players relax in a cartoonish tropical vacation world, and Paper Valley, a zen paper airplane adventure.
Alex Schwartz, chief executor of Owlchemy Labs, the maker of Vacation Simulator, said the company decided to completely dedicate its resources to VR several years ago.
“The biggest and most successful our company has been was to go all-in on VR,” said Schwartz, who founded Owlchemy in Boston before moving the company to Austin. “It was totally a gut decision. We think this technology is going to be something magical.”
Owlchemy, acquired by Google last year, previously released Job Simulator, where the player becomes immersed in a cartoon office world.
VR headsets have not hit the stratospheric levels some predicted, but have been steadily growing. One analyst report last year said sales of headsets topped one million for the first time in the third quarter of 2017. The firm, Canalys, expects more than 7.5 million headsets to be sold in 2018.
Fueling that growth is expected to be new headsets released this year. Oculus is expected to release the Oculus Go, a $200 standalone headset that won’t require any additional equipment. High-end virtual reality headsets generally require a computer or game console to supply the computing power necessary.
Arnold said the Go’s release will help bring VR to many new customers. Still, it is hard to sell virtual reality to a potential customer without showing them the experience, he said.
“You have to get people into the headset to really sell the experience,” Arnold said. “People are super satisfied with the purchase they’ve made in VR, and they’re starting to share that with other people.”
Though games dominate the world of VR content right now, both Arnold and Schwartz said games will be an introduction to more entertainment content.
“It’s an information delivery device,” Schwartz said of VR. “This is the beginning of a new medium. It’s growing at a really good clip.”