USA TODAY International Edition
Don’t write off virtual reality just yet
But don’t hold your breath for technology to take hold as hoped
Will virtual reality go the way of 3-D TV — namely, nowhere?
VR almost certainly has a brighter upside in the home than 3-D ever had. And yet the unflattering parallels between 3-D TV and VR, however imperfect, appear all too real. Uber-hyped VR efforts are off to a tepid start at best, raising the stakes for industry executives banking on a better long-term outcome.
At the beginning of this decade, many of the largest companies in the tech and entertainment industries promoted three-dimensional television as a newly immersive showpiece of your home theater, a promise to put you right smack into the center of the action.
Only the stampede to 3-D glory in the living room never happened.
Consumers were reluctant to spend for higherpriced TVs. There was little fresh content. Viewers balked at having to wear funky eyeglasses.
Fast-forward to today, and you see similar impediments with virtual reality. The most engaging VR consumer systems currently available — the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PlayStation VR — are not only pricey but also complicated to set up. For now, anyway, these must be tethered to expensive computers or, in Sony’s case, a PlayStation video game console.
Killer content has been MIA. And, yes, you have to wear a large contraption around your noggin. Uncomfortable headgear makes some people feel sick, fatigued or trapped.
“This is VR 1.0,” Andrew House, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, told USA TODAY in June.
“We’ve got to remove this friction,” said Alex Kipman, technical fellow at the operating systems group at Microsoft, which is pursuing a “mixed reality” strategy, blending VR with elements from from a different immersive tech, augmented reality (or AR).
Microsoft’s approach, trickled down from its enterprise-focused HoloLens solution, is to bring out $399, consumer-friendly virtual reality bundles this holiday season from hardware partners such as HP, Lenovo, Dell and Acer. The promise is that they’ll work with mainstream-priced Windows 10 PCs rather than only expensive gaming rigs.
Clay Bavor, who leads the virtual reality team at Google, also notes the need for progress: “To make VR more transporting, and AR more convincing and useful, everything behind these experiences must improve: displays, optics, tracking, input, GPUs, sensors, and more,” he wrote on Medium just ahead of the Google I/O conference this past spring.
The VR products along the consumer spectrum deliver very different levels of immersion. At the most basic end are cheap Google Cardboard viewers used with smartphones, which merely provide consumers with a glimpse into the tech’s possibilities.
A better experience, though not without flaws, comes with step-up mobile headgear, notably Google’s Daydream and Samsung’s Gear VR, which incorporates Oculus tech. These work with a limited set of smartphones.
And then there’s the Vive, Rift or PlayStation VR, which, while providing the most vivid experiences, also come with the aforementioned challenges.
Getting people to sample quality VR remains a key. Only about third of consumers between 18 and 64 have tried VR, according to research by the Magid consulting firm. But there’s also reason for optimism in the numbers: 84% of those who’ve used VR on a mobile device would recommend the technology to others; 86% of those who’ve used it on a PC or console would do the same.
While most of the nascent efforts in VR have focused on fantasy play and gaming, the expansive vision for the tech is to go beyond entertainment and to teach, train and let us travel virtually to farflung destinations, from Mount Everest to the moon.
VR also promises to make an impact in fields as diverse as real estate and health care. And news outlets, including USA TODAY, see a real future for the medium.
Facebook, Google, Samsung, Sony and HTC are among the bigtime believers, best evidenced by the $2 billion Facebook paid to acquire Oculus in 2014.
Oculus’ Rift, though, has been a soft seller, and the company recently lowered the headset’s price not once but twice.
Jason Rubin, vice president of content at Oculus, said this was the company’s plan all along.
“Just like countless forms of revolutionary technology, it takes time for the content, the business and the price to all converge into a true mass-market phenomenon,” he said.
“It takes time for the content, the business and the price to all converge into a true mass-market phenomenon.”
Jason Rubin, vice president of content at Oculus