STEADY GROWTH EDGES VR CLOSER TO DEEPER MAINSTREAM WATERS By CHRIS McGOWAN
TOP: The VR rhythm game Beat Saber involves slicing through cubes to the beat of popular hits from artists like Billie Eilish, available in DLC releases. Beat Saber has sold more than 4 million copies across all VR platforms and earned more than $100 million in total revenue. (Image courtesy of Beat Games and Oculus Studios/Meta) OPPOSITE TOP TO BOTTOM: You may find yourself in a digital living room using a HP Reverb G2 VR headset, which boasts a resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 pixels per eye and a 114-degree field of view. (Image courtesy of Hewlett Packard) Hewlett Packard’s HP Reverb G2 VR headset, developed in collaboration with Windows and Valve. (Image courtesy of Hewlett Packard) Peak Blinders: The King’s Ransom is a narrative-driven VR adventure developed and published by Maze Theory. (Image courtesy of Maze Theory)
VR is going mainstream next year. VR is going nowhere. AR will be bigger than VR. There is no consensus on where virtual reality and augmented reality are headed and how soon they will get there. But although the virtual reality and augmented reality platforms are still far from mass acceptance, certain positive signs indicate that they really will become large, viable businesses, growing steadily over the next several years. Tuong H. Nguyen, Senior Principal Analyst for Gartner, Inc., comments, “AR and VR have been hyped as being ready for widespread adoption for a long time, but the technology, use cases, content and ecosystem readiness have yet to live up to the hype.” Nguyen believes that VR in particular will go mainstream when it has three Cs – content, convenience and control. He notes, “While we’ve made progress on all these fronts, we’re still far from reaching the point where each of those aspects are sufficiently mature to make VR go mainstream. It will become mainstream, but I don’t expect it to happen until five to 10 years from now.” Others are pessimistic that VR will ever become mainstream. “The answer is never. Sorry. Here’s why. People don’t like wearing stuff on their face and getting sick doing it, and having to pay a lot of money for the privilege,” says Jon Peddie, President of Jon Peddie Research and author of the book Augmented Reality, Where We Will All Live. “The VR market has bifurcated into industrial and scientific – where it started in the 1990s – and consumer. The consumer portion is a small group of gamers and a few – very few – people who watch 360 videos.” On the other hand, in the opinion of Maze Theory CEO Ian Hambleton, the point has passed for people to doubt VR’s future. “With over 10 million active headsets on Oculus Quest sold now, it’s an active ecosystem. The 10 million unit number is often cited
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