What’s Next?
This was originally posted to a publication focused on Virtual Reality in December, 2016. Today that publication was removed from the web, so I’m reposting it here because of the responses it received.
Major innovations are rarely accidental, and significant time, energy and resources are almost always required to achieve them.
Without going into an argument to prove what a major innovation is, for simplicity’s sake, let’s agree that a major innovation is one which never previously existed, or previously remained a secret to the vast majority of society, so much so, that people hearing about it for the first time would consider it to be impossible or currently unattainable.
Now let’s talk about Virtual Reality, or VR. If you’re reading this post, chances are you’re one of the few million (as in, around 8 million) people on planet earth that have actually experienced VR at some point. You’re also likely one of the approximately 5 million people on planet earth (this number is changing rapidly) that own a VR apparatus. Whether you’ve experienced VR firsthand or not, you likely also know that to experience virtual reality, you generally have to wear some kind of headset over your eyes (that’s powered by your phone or some other computing device) that renders static or interactive video content stereoscopically. Like VR, augmented reality, or AR, allows you to see some kind of virtual content augmented on the physical world, and also requires some kind of glasses or lens-type device that allows you to see these images, while simultaneously viewing the real world (see one of the many videos on Microsoft’s Hololens for more info).
Whether you’ve had a positive or negative experience with VR or AR (negative experiences are usually caused by poorly made VR content, which can cause induced motion sickness; more on that here), you almost definitely realized you were seeing something truly amazing, unlike anything you’ve experienced in the past.
Now, what if I told you that in three years, you’ll likely communicate with most of the people you interact-with on a daily basis in virtual, or at least mixed reality? Would you consider that impossible or currently unattainable?
I would, only because of how niche VR is right now. That said, if a company like Apple introduced a cool pice of consumer friendly hardware (which Tim Cook has repeatedly hinted at over the past year) that incorporates rules to prevent low quality content (to prevent motion sickness — a list of best practices for producing high-quality content can be found here), VR will take-off faster than you can say “virtual reality” ten times quickly.
So why do I believe VR will go mainstream faster than mobile has? Because billions of dollars are being spent each year, from budgets allocated to “mobile”, on developing VR technology, and mobile will morph into VR, or at the very least, AR, VR’s cooler, more popular cousin.
Now let’s get back to our initial conversation about major innovations, and how that relates to VR, something we’ve proven is an example of a major innovation.
Today, there are over 300 engineers at Apple alone focused on 3D sensors. Assembling Tim Cook’s hints, Apple’s resource allocation, the collective billions of dollars a year spent developing the technology and the beliefs of thought leaders like Robert Scoble and many others, it’s easy to see just how much planning, effort and resources have been allocated to the development of a truly consumer-friendly version of VR.
Now, lets go back to our original question:
What if I told you that in three years, you’ll likely communicate with most of the people you interact-with on a daily basis in virtual, or mixed reality?
