Moon VR Player returns with passthrough AR mode

Hello Randolf, can you please introduce yourself to my readers?

My name is Randolf, Chief Growth Officer at Moon VR. I am a serial entrepreneur and marketer active in the internet of things, fintech, and blockchain sectors. As someone who has grown user bases on different continents, I consider myself an all-rounded marketer in all marketing subjects relevant to a tech product’s growth. A few months back, a friend referred me to the Moon VR team, and I found what they do pretty interesting stuff. So I joined the team to help them navigate through the marketing side of the business when the product came back.

Our CEO Tao, on the other hand, has been a geek his whole life. 

After graduating from the University of Southern California in Computer Sciences, he joined Oculus VR out of his passion for virtual reality. He was part of the team behind the GearVR app store and developed some of Oculus’ first native apps, e.g., Oculus Video and Oculus Social.

He left in 2016 and founded his startup. The rest is our long story…

Well, I have time for a long story…

Our story began in 2016 when Tao Hu, our founder, and CEO, left Oculus and started the company with VC seed funding and a group of like-minded geeks.

In the beginning, we had several VR projects. A VR cat app, a VR game capture app, and a VR movie show. Moon VR Video Player was just one of them. But it received the most immediate success. This was probably due to the lack of usable VR video players on the market at the time, and the fact that we paid a great deal of attention to the actual user experience. In fact, we believe we were among the first to make a truly usable VR video player.

This effectively made us one of the most downloaded VR video players back then. We had 500k downloads on Google Play, 100k downloads on Gear VR, and 50k on Steam.

But in 2017, we ran out of funding, and the monetization efforts also failed. If you ask us our thoughts on what happened at the time, we’d say the industry wasn’t ready for a full-blown hit of consumer-focused VR companies. Users, in general, refused to pay, and it was for a good reason. Simply put, the experiences that the industry as a whole could offer were far from something people wanted to pay for. The hype revolved too much around investment interests and pure technological evangelism, but, as we learned later, mass adoption of new technology requires more than that.

We began to struggle and later suspended development altogether. It was not easy for us as we still believed in virtual reality. We decided to keep a flexible team structure with mostly volunteer work. Our CEO was the only one working almost full time, but even he needed to do side projects for cash, pay for the server and have minimal maintenance costs.  The rest of the team had to look for other jobs. Some were VR-related, and some were not.

We almost disbanded. In fact, we were once on the verge of it.

This is how we managed to get by till late 2021. Then the whole Metaverse trend began to take off. Some say the concept is overly futuristic. Some say big tech’s greed drives it. But for us, regardless, it shines a light on a startup like Moon VR. The concept has sparked venture funds’ strong interest, and VR is right at its center. We started to have conversations with venture funds and soon landed new funding – not a big one as they still need to see actual, broader adoption, but enough for us to keep running for a long while.

We’re incredibly grateful for this new start, and we’re working day and night to add more features at the time of writing! Our latest update is the world’s first pass-through feature on a VR video player.

What do you think is the biggest takeaway from this story?

It would be the significance of a feasible value proposition that a broader user base finds relevant. A valid, value-adding product is not in direct relation to VC investments or pure technological idealism. 

Also, timing is crucial. A financially successful app can only be made possible when the surrounding ecosystem starts to reach customer needs. Only when this change happens users get a valuable experience and are willing to pay for it.

Let’s talk about your new product. What are the features that the new Moon VR Video Player offers?

• Passthrough: be aware of your real-world surroundings while watching VR movies
• Moon Link: wirelessly watch VR videos from your Windows PC, Mac or other local devices 
• Background environments: galaxy, sea view and more
• Multiple video stereo modes supported and automatically recognized: 180°/ 360°/ 2D/ 3D
• Multiple video formats supported: mkv/ mp4/ wmv/ mov/ avi/ rmvb/ flv
• Multiple subtitles and audio tracks from external sources supported
• Fix ghosting: remove faulty ghosting in the video
• Gaze-based control: head tracking and effortless hands-free control
• Screen adjustments: Brightness, distance, zoom, and curved display
• Rotate, mirror and single-eye viewing: watch videos from perspective you like

What do you think can make it stand out when compared to the competition?

The most differentiating features at the moment would be Moon Link and Passthrough. We are the first to bring the Passthrough function to a VR video player. Years ago, we were also the first to introduce the likes of Moon Link, which enables direct streaming between the PC and the headset in the video player.

We pay close attention to new technologies and how they can be applied in real-life scenarios to create value for users. This is partially thanks to our all-star team – I don’t want to sound arrogant, but let me say that I am grateful to our brilliant colleagues

What’s its current price and where can it be downloaded?

For Quest 2, our app is completely free of charge at the moment. Users can download the app from our website, Sidequest, or Applab. For PCs and other headsets, we recommend downloading it from our official Steam page. It is currently priced at $9.99 there, but we will be launching promotions, so stay tuned 🙂

How do you think monetizing it?

We plan to either offer a paid, premium version with exclusive features or build a supplementary ecosystem around the video player. In the latter case, the video player would remain essentially free, and there would be other value-adding experiences that are of value to users. Hopefully, it is something users are willing to pay for.

What are your future plans?

We will add more features, and what features to be added depends on user feedback and technical feasibility. Some new features are already under development and will be unveiled soon.

What’s your vision for the future of XR, that is what everyone now calls “The metaverse”?

We believe that XR will eventually be accessible to the mass market when the hardware becomes more affordable and powerful. Perhaps the devices will no longer be called “headsets” by then, as they will look more like a pair of glasses or the hulking goggles you see in sci-fi shows. Entertainment, gaming, and workplaces will be the first to widely adopt XR solutions, as the benefits of immersive experiences are more visible for these sectors. Each major big tech will introduce its exclusive metaverse and fiercely compete to capture market share in the mass market. The capital market will fuel this intense competition. But in the end, the ultimate metaverse will not be exclusive, and no one will seize the absolute monopoly – or the regulators will step in and tell them that there can be no monopoly and that things must be made interchangeable. In the end, it will look a lot like the internet of today. 

Advances in blockchain technology will also help facilitate this process. 

There is always a big debate about 360 videos being VR or not. What’s your stance on this? And do you think that 360 videos can still be relevant in the modern VR market?

From a technical perspective, 360 video is hardly an actual VR experience, yet it still helps educate the public about VR concepts. We see that most people got their first immersive “VR” experience with a simple combination of Cardboard and Youtube VR.

Although it has limitations in displaying actual immersive content, we believe it will exist as a content format in the long term as it is easier to generate compared with actual VR content.

You are from China. What is the current status of the Chinese XR ecosystem?

Bytedance acquired Pico, and they are spending a great deal of time and money to promote Pico Neo 3, so we anticipate a massive wave of VR devices adoption. Hardware-based big tech companies would further fuel the wave, introducing their own devices or expanding their VR device product lines. This includes but is not limited to HTC, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Huawei. The same goes for Valve, Apple, and Sony, whose established presence here would allow them to cut into the high-end section of the market without much difficulty. VR-only manufacturers will face both opportunities and challenges from the big tech’s push. Some will end up acquired by a big tech company, like Pico’s story. 

It’s going to be a chaotic pandemonium. All manufacturers will be fighting for their ecosystem, and the competition will get quite intense. In the end, some will fail, and some will thrive. 

There are also many software/game developers who are creating experiences for the manufacturers mentioned above. Some of the big techs are also developing their software and games. 

There are not many independent teams on the software side of things like us. But we are still thrilled to see teams like Contractors’ developer, Caveman Game Studio, achieve momentum and popularity worldwide. 

If you had to teach a lesson to someone that wants to launch his/her experience on the VR market, what would it be?

Find a valid, value-adding use case and make sure your product fulfills what customers’ minimal expectations for that use case.  

Anything else to add to this interview?

No. The above pretty much covered everything! Thank you!