Image Credit: Jeremy Ellsworth at Edoramedia
As I wrote back in June, startups in the VR/AR space are wading through a shroud of mystery as to when the industry’s winter will give way to widespread traction and mainstream adoption. I also offered an example of an exceptional case earlier this month about how a UK-based startup, VirtualSpeech, meandered through a series of different combinations of product-market fits and revenue models until they were able to spot an intersection with a traditional industry that delivered a revenue positive outcome.
Unfortunately, most of VirtualSpeech’s peers aren’t (or weren’t) so lucky, which in most cases isn’t owing to any particular failing on their part per se, but is rather a consequence of facing the market reality of a long and perhaps overextended hype cycle. That the landscape is murky is a continual fact of existence for the industry at this point in time, but the fog does seem to be starting to clear.
“The reality is, we are dealing with a distinct situation where a lots of capital was invested in hardware and then more capital was injected into content under the presumption that content is King.” Benjamin Durham, the chief operating officer at Thrillbox, an immersive streaming data management platform, told me. “However, we are now learning that the consumer is King. Not content. What is interesting, that we as a community must work towards understanding, is why the retention is so difficult.”
When the customer is king in a murky market landscape, the priority has to be on doubling your efforts on how to approach the task of understanding your end-users, head to toe and inside out, which in this case means employing mixed reality analytics tools and methods to track their behaviors and interactions within an immersive setting. The problem, however, is that the majority of VR/AR startups appear to be altogether missing, lacking, ignoring, or even actively avoiding the effective use of this new breed of intelligence and performance tools that are inherently designed for comprehending the dynamics of user interactions in 3D worlds.
Shifting the mindset, yesterday
One factor at play is that we have a generation of teams with backgrounds in 2D web, native, and mobile applications entering the scene as the pioneers of an emerging tech that intends to disrupt traditional industries. What’s ironic is that these same would-be disruptors tend to overlook the fact that in order to approach the task, effectively, they have to simultaneously let go of the old tool-kits and practices that served them so well when their products were indeed 2D. It’s the catch-22 that forces old habits to die hard.
I asked CEOs of two mixed reality analytics platforms to illustrate what the actual tally is of startups that are equipped with the right sort of analytics to navigate through the landscape intelligently. While Alexander Haque at Retinadbelieves the number of startups that actively use mixed reality analytics in a “rigorous, methodological and effective way” to be between 10 percent to 15 percent, Lucas Toohey at ObserVR scores it below 5 percent.
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Image Credit: Jeremy Ellsworth at Edoramedia
As I wrote back in June, startups in the VR/AR space are wading through a shroud of mystery as to when the industry’s winter will give way to widespread traction and mainstream adoption. I also offered an example of an exceptional case earlier this month about how a UK-based startup, VirtualSpeech, meandered through a series of different combinations of product-market fits and revenue models until they were able to spot an intersection with a traditional industry that delivered a revenue positive outcome.
Unfortunately, most of VirtualSpeech’s peers aren’t (or weren’t) so lucky, which in most cases isn’t owing to any particular failing on their part per se, but is rather a consequence of facing the market reality of a long and perhaps overextended hype cycle. That the landscape is murky is a continual fact of existence for the industry at this point in time, but the fog does seem to be starting to clear.
“The reality is, we are dealing with a distinct situation where a lots of capital was invested in hardware and then more capital was injected into content under the presumption that content is King.” Benjamin Durham, the chief operating officer at Thrillbox, an immersive streaming data management platform, told me. “However, we are now learning that the consumer is King. Not content. What is interesting, that we as a community must work towards understanding, is why the retention is so difficult.”
When the customer is king in a murky market landscape, the priority has to be on doubling your efforts on how to approach the task of understanding your end-users, head to toe and inside out, which in this case means employing mixed reality analytics tools and methods to track their behaviors and interactions within an immersive setting. The problem, however, is that the majority of VR/AR startups appear to be altogether missing, lacking, ignoring, or even actively avoiding the effective use of this new breed of intelligence and performance tools that are inherently designed for comprehending the dynamics of user interactions in 3D worlds.
Shifting the mindset, yesterday
One factor at play is that we have a generation of teams with backgrounds in 2D web, native, and mobile applications entering the scene as the pioneers of an emerging tech that intends to disrupt traditional industries. What’s ironic is that these same would-be disruptors tend to overlook the fact that in order to approach the task, effectively, they have to simultaneously let go of the old tool-kits and practices that served them so well when their products were indeed 2D. It’s the catch-22 that forces old habits to die hard.
I asked CEOs of two mixed reality analytics platforms to illustrate what the actual tally is of startups that are equipped with the right sort of analytics to navigate through the landscape intelligently. While Alexander Haque at Retinadbelieves the number of startups that actively use mixed reality analytics in a “rigorous, methodological and effective way” to be between 10 percent to 15 percent, Lucas Toohey at ObserVR scores it below 5 percent.
Source: Venture Beat