You can’t fault Mark Zuckerberg for putting his mouth where his money is when it comes to virtual reality.
Three years after dropping up to $2 billion to buy Oculus, he’s now front and central when it comes to revealing VR technology that actually has a chance of going mass market.
Significantly, the announcement of Oculus Gowasn’t about the technology though.
Sure, the all-in wires-free headset is doing plenty of smart things, even if it is dropping six degrees of freedom head tracking for just three. But the headlines were all about the price.
$199 is certainly affordable, especially compared to $599 for the original Rift, sans compatible PC and Touch controllers.
No doubt, this is heavily-subsidised pricing from Facebook, which will either be restricting supply to limit overall losses or, more likely, aggressively marketing to generate high demand to drive down unit costs.
Yet given the messianic hype VR has generated, I wonder if hardware price has been the key factor in holding back a technology which underperformed already-low-balled 2016 revenue expectations by 40%?
Early adopters retreat
As anyone who writes about technology well knows, predictions are a fools’ errand. The future is way too unpredictable for anything more than a 12 month horizon to be meaningful.
On that basis, graphs that suggest the VR market will be worth $20 billion by 2020, or the combined AR/VR market worth $100 billion by 2021 are clearly too embedded with yesterday’s thinking to offer more accuracy than the twice-a-day odds of a stopped clock.
Did any of them model in a $200 VR headset from Facebook in 2018, I wonder?
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Oculus Go – priced for all?
What’s more interesting – and difficult – to think about is how the VR market could reach such valuations, and notably why people will use technology at that scale.
For, as recent examples such as 3DTV and smart TV demonstrate, the existence of a technology – even something like smart TV that’s given away for free – is no guarantee anyone will actually use it.
Conversely, the rise of the mobile phone and then the smartphone show just how fast and how mass market expensive technology can go. Oft forgotten now, there was a lot of societal pushback against mobile phones in the mid to late-90s, and this despite the clear advantages being able to talk to anyone anytime provided.
Ironically, the rise of smartphones came at the cost of talking to people. Instead, mobile computing enabled developers to package existing experiences – online news, music, photography, Facebook – in a more accessible fashion. The app economy was born.
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Source: Pocket Gamer