VR: Fad or The Future
It’s the 2016 industry watchword, but can VR deliver more than just a niche experience? Travis Johnson discusses the challenges facing VR in breaking through from fad to marketing future.
Every year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona there seems to be one technology that dominates the exhibition halls. Last year it was the connected car, and the year before it was the possibilities of NFC.
This year, every few hundred metres you’d see a bunch of people sitting with crazy contraptions strapped to their heads, with arms and legs flailing, whilst smiling and, occasionally, gasping.
Every one of the major electronics manufacturers were showcasing their virtual reality viewers and headsets with many also launching 360° content capturing devices.
Great observations Trav!
I think that Augmented Reality is going to have more day to day practical use cases and therefore a broader take up, versus Virtual Reality in the short to medium terms.
The beauty about AR is you continue to experience the real world around you and superimpose a virtual experience or interface onto any surface or in the space around you. Obviously the beauty of VR is that is a totally immersive experience. *But, I’m one of those who experiences VR nausea!
While AR will eventually be neatly tucked into the sides of everyone’s sports sunnies, VR is always going to have to enclose your eyes and ears with lenses, displays and headphones to work.
In general, AR specs are lighter and more comfortable than VR headsets and they are more likely to be wireless.
But as you’ve touched on, content and the user interface (an entirely new paradigm of UI by the way) will ultimately drive what succeeds, or doesn’t. So, if people want to follow a path to the future, follow those companies creating amazing content, user interfaces and interactive experiences (ie. Magic Leap, MetaGlasses), not just the hardware.
Almost all of the consumer related content being created for VR at the moment is more like simple, 360 degree video vs true VR. And as was highlighted at Sundance, filmmakers just haven’t cracked the storytelling approach with VR content.
The future is looking very exciting and we’ll have both AR and VR to experience and design around as well as in-ear personal assistants (a whole other exciting development).
Some of the hardware:
AR – Hololens, Magic Leap, MetaGlasses, Atheer, ODG SmartGlasses etc.
VR – Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Avegant Glyph, Razor OSVR etc.
There is another barrier…
To support VR technology into the future, Australia needs a strong digital communications infrastructure.
The path which the current *NBN is on will not meet this need.
*Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project valued at $56Billion (according to recent PwC Reports the NBN is valued at $27Billion)
Great write up Travis. The teardown of Oculus for instance reveals Samsung Note 3 – so much of the manufacturing capability to support explosive results is there. The NBN network is one facet and moves to 5G another. For high end AR and VR experiences, the mobile connectivity will be important too. There are three other key technologies which bring VR transmission comparable to HD through to 4K levels… at present there is a lot of waste in AR and VR computational processes.
Good information there Travis.
I wanted to jump in here from a developer / content creator point of view.
Firstly I wanted to address the motion sickness comments. We have been developing for VR since the DK1 release and there are do’s and don’ts when it comes to VR Nausea. Unfortunately there are some experiences out there that induce this sensation which is giving VR a bad name (from bad development). The premium equipment (VIVE) coupled with proper development has no VR nausea.
Although 360 video is associated with VR, it doesn’t give the user the sensation of depth since it is typically a 2D video that the user can look around. Stereoscopic 360 video offers a much better sense of immersion however most people experience flat 2D 360 video which doesn’t utilize the depth that VR headsets were designed to provide.
As developers for AR and VR we see the benefits of both technologies however premium devices like the Hololens only have a narrow field of view which breaks the sense of immersion that only VR can (currently) provide. As AR technology gets better/faster/smaller it will become more common but in the short term VR is where the majority of development is taking place.
I disagree to the comment from Martin regarding the majority of the development being in simple 360 video experiences. We have been developing full immersive 3D VR content for the past 3 years (including content for major global brands), and with a team of 10+ 3D artists and programmers we are struggling to keep up with the demand for immersive VR.
Looking to the future NBN will play a role in delivering large data sets over distances, however in the short term the majority of consumer VR is being created with Game Engine technology (Unity, Unreal etc) so the bandwidth for multi user experiences is somewhat adequate (for now).
Can VR deliver more than just a niche experience? In a word, no.
It didn’t even reach the niche level during its last time in the sun, twenty years ago.
Hey Travis.
I’m glad you got the chance to see all that critical momentum around VR at MWC. Undoubtedly, there is a big 360 video, gaming and training opportunity with VR headsets, and that will all enter the mainstream this year (this month, in fact, with Oculus official launch).
The use cases of Duke energy and Zurich are similar to results being experienced by Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, DHL, Huntington Ingalls, Caterpillar and many, many more manufacturers as time-to-task education is uniformly increased by more than 35% and errors are reduced over 90%.
But that is Augmented Reality (rather than virtual) that is achieving those results. That means people absorb information much faster, and retain that information much better – when it’s conveyed in augmented space. Even tablet driven AR (not just HMDs) is seeing extraordinary results. For example, in Airbus: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2079159-building-aircraft-in-augmented-reality-is-quicker-and-safer/
I read an interesting survey of 270 CMOs yesterday that said over 60% thought AR would be very important to marketing in 2016, but only 20% had done anything before or have allocated budgets. It was the most extraordinary contradiction of all the other marketing technology survey areas. I don’t think many people realise how fast it’s coming now, the huge investment by the most powerful companies in the world, and they certainly don’t know how it will disrupt their business. But it will. It’s just very, very hard for people to imagine. Until they get the chance to wear Hololens, Meta or Magic Leap, that is.
Hi David,
Good to hear from you and get your thoughts.
Just to clarify on the VR/AR thing, many examples use both…
On one end a specialist is using VR to fully immerse his/herself in a scenario, and on the ‘receiving’ end the person uses AR to provide the advice/assistance they need on top of the reality they are seeing. Hope that makes sense.
Other great VR examples including training for doctors, training for operating heavy machinery and also underwater scenarios.
Hey Travis.
I know exactly the sort of application you’re talking about. I tried out a very similar application with a company called ‘Vital Medicals’ using ODG R7, last year in the US.
Although there is a distinction between VR and AR today, I doubt there will be – a year from now. The moment you see your hands in a VR headset, that’s essentially AR.
It’s very hard to label and describe all these things most people haven’t seen/experienced yet.
I know you’ve been following all of this for a while now – and have supported AR since ‘way back’ when at MNET and we worked together. Pretty advanced stuff, back then. Nice to see it all coming of age and heading to the mainstream. Thank God. It’s been quite a wait!
Congrats on your new role, by the way.
Dave