VR is dead, the metaverse is dead. Maybe.

Here we are again. A few days ago, I was reading some suggested posts on Twitter, and I found a comment from a guy to a post from someone in our VR community saying something like “Admit it, VR is the 3D TV of our times” and getting lots of likes. I hoped that that comparison was dead in 2018, but it seems that it still has lots of fans.

The Autumn of VR

We are in an “Autumn” of Virtual Reality. After the big hopes given by the success of the Quest and the huge illusion of the hype of the metaverse, we are stuck in a quite stagnating market. The fact that the growth of VR seems to have paused is causing a lot of pessimism in the ecosystem. And the negative economic conditions are not helping, either. People have started wondering if Virtual Reality will ever become mainstream, and the metaverse has become kind of a joke, about which even Meta took some steps back.

Notice that I’m talking about Autumn and not Winter because I’ve been there during the real Winter of VR, in 2017-2018, and I can tell you that the vibes were totally different. All the magazines were saying “VR is dead”, and finding paying projects for my consultancy company was incredibly difficult. When we VR people talked in the communities, our common statement was “We’re doing everything we can to survive”. Now the situation is totally different, and many companies can live by just doing immersive realities projects. I can see VR companies having open job positions, and people asking me for support for their work. The situation is not as flourishing as at the beginning of 2022, but it’s still doing ok.

VR is already here

This talking again if VR is dead or is the new 3DTV in 2023 is just utter nonsense because VR is already here. Virtual Reality headsets are for instance already used in many industrial sectors: I’ve heard that now all automotive companies use VR in some way in their production processes. If we talk about XR in general (including so also AR headsets and smartglasses), we have lots of use cases like training, maintenance, remote assistance, psychology, etc… where headsets and glasses are already used every day.

If we talk about the consumer market, according to the latest report, 20M Quests have been sold, and the Quest 2 has sold more or less the same units as the latest XBox. There are many ads about VR, now also on Italian TV (yeah, I’ve seen that shitty Meta’s ad about the metaverse). Almost everyone, even people that are not in our field, knows what virtual reality headsets are. And even the press has positive impressions about the headsets they try: PSVR 2, for instance, was launched with good reviews even from mainstream tech magazines.

There are companies making money by just making VR accessories or VR games. I myself have more opportunities in the field than I can handle.

VR is nowhere close to death, it’s well alive. The problem is that it is not entering the wide consumer mainstream adoption. It is currently stagnating, and even headsets about which we had hopes (like PSVR 2) are not performing as expected.

Can VR enter the mainstream?

A few weeks ago, a very interesting comment on one of my articles was doubting that VR can ever enter the wide mainstream. We all usually blame a few things for VR not being able to reach widespread adoption:

• The high price
• The virtual sickness it can cause
• The non-satisfying content
• The fact that VR should be tried before it is understood
• Etc…

That comment stated that most of these concerns have actually been already addressed, at least in part:

• The Quest used to cost $299, which is a very low price
• Many games are designed with comfort in mind
• The library of content on the Quest is not huge, but it is big enough for months of fun
• There are already lots of ads about VR, exhibitions with VR booths, and demo stations at some supermarket, so people have many occasions to try VR headsets

… and notwithstanding all of this, VR has not become a huge platform yet. The conclusion was that since the main reasons for which we think VR is not mainstream are not totally true anymore, probably VR will never become mainstream.

It is a fascinating thesis and I agree in part with it. My theory is that “Current VR” is not becoming mainstream.

Innovation happens in sprints

While I was thinking about what to write in this article, I remembered something I studied at University about innovation. Innovation usually doesn’t follow a linear route, but goes through sprints and disruptions. It is not a continuous line, but there are many jumps.

Think about what happened to VR: we had the Oculus devkits, which interested only us developers. Then the Vive arrived, introduced the disruption of room scale and 6DOF controllers, and many more people entered PCVR. Then the PCVR market saturated, and reached those who were interested in that, causing the Winter of VR. In 2019 Quest launched, and with its new form factor and price, opened a new wider market, which grew then even more with the lower price of the Quest 2. Now we are probably at the end of the cycle of this “sprint” forward caused by the arrival of standalone headsets and are waiting for the next “big thing” that will make us go forward again. Maybe this “big thing” will be the famous Apple headset, which thanks to the Apple brand and some key innovations, will draw new people into our market. And after that, there will be something else. Rinse and repeat.

This is why I stopped believing the forecasts of the “market analysts”: usually they just fit a linear or exponential curve to some current data… it’s like the followed a few lessons of algebra and created a profession out of it. Market Analysts can’t predict when the “next innovation” can happen. Also because the market is unpredictable: sometimes some great ideas don’t become mainstream, and other insignificant ones attract a lot of people. So whenever I see market predictions about immersive realities that arrive to 2030, I think they have the same reliability as the horoscope.

The current virtual reality, the one of this sprint, managed to “touch” the mainstream market, but I agree will never become mainstream. We need something more.

The constant evolution

Innovation requires time. When I entered VR in 2014, I was expecting the market to enter the mainstream in 2016, with the release of Oculus CV1. I was so young and naive. After more than 8 years in the field, I look back and(I see myself having become older and grumpier, plus… ) on one side, it seems to me that many years have passed but many things have remained the same, but on the other side, I see that everything has evolved a lot.

I started with the Oculus Rift DK2, which required a quite powerful laptop to work and didn’t have any controller. Together with my previous partner Gianni, we created a full system for full-body VR that required three Kinects in the room plus a headset connected to a big computer. Now, all that setup can be substituted by a very small Vive XR Elite, its two controllers, and a few of the upcoming Vive Inside-Out Trackers. How the situation evolved it’s quite impressive. But it required 8-9 years to get there, with many innovations happening over time.

Evolution takes time, a lot of time. And the VR field is constantly evolving. In this article, I’m talking about VR, but actually, standalone VR is basically vanishing. All the next-generation standalone headsets are already mixed reality ones with colored passthrough, and they work both as AR and VR headsets. I don’t know how much this is the next “step” that will give a new life to immersive realities now, but for sure over time this choice will bring big consequences. This, together with the local dimming of Magic Leap 2, show that now the AR and VR categories are starting to blur, and we could call the headsets AR-first or VR-first, and not AR or VR anymore.

The situation is constantly evolving. The road to mainstream adoption will be very long, and will require a lot of new technological advancements, content advancements, and so on. Remember that innovations in content are important like the ones about hardware: Half-Life: Alyx, for instance, brought a lot of positive effects to our field.

What I know is that innovation happens in a chaotic way, and usually is about companies iterating over what others have done. OSVR is a headset that didn’t last much, but I heard it facilitated the Windows Mixed Reality platform into coming to life. WMR itself wasn’t a huge success, but it was the first headset featuring inside-out tracking, and it proved that people were perfectly fine with having a bit less accuracy than external-beacon-based tracking in exchange for higher usability. Inside-out tracking is now the basis of all the most popular standalone headsets. As you can see, it is a whole field evolving together, and while a company like Meta has been the driving force of XR for the last year, its growth has been possible also thanks to what the other companies have released over time. For instance, remember that the Oculus CV1 was released with a remote and was meant to be used for seated play with a gamepad… and then the Vive arrived.

We are all here for the long run, waiting for this chaotic evolution process to bring us big results. And I totally agree with Sony Pictures’s Jake Zim when he says that if we are in this field, we must be committed to staying here for another 10 years:

What XR needs

I imagine you now asking me: “Ok Tony, all of this makes sense, great reasoning… but so, what XR needs to become mainstream?”. My honest answer is “If I knew, I wouldn’t be writing this article, but I would already be using that info to become a billionaire”. The truth is that no one knows. We know that we have to work on many things: content, comfort, friction (this is a huge one), design, social reputation, etc… but we still don’t know exactly which will be the next trigger.

The convergence of technologies

I loved Charlie Fink’s book “Convergence” because it opened my eyes about technologies not living in a vacuum. AR, VR, 5G, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, … are not siloes that live independently. They all grow together and influence each other. That’s why I find so stupid when I hear that “The metaverse is old, the new technology is artificial intelligence”. Apart from the fact that AI exists since decades, AI is already bringing and will bring enormous positive effects on the XR field, too. Just think about how Chat GPT could enable more creators to create XR content, or how Nerfs can be disruptive in bringing existing landscapes to VR applications. AI has just had a big innovation sprint, and is having a lot of hype around it, and this will be beneficial for many other technologies.

I see all these technologies growing together and shaping a totally different reality for all of us. Think about how widespread fast mobile internet helped the smartphone to become a fundamental companion for everyone…

What I mean is: we can’t evaluate XR alone. There is a whole tech landscape that is moving together.

Will XR enter the mainstream?

At this point, you are still asking if I think XR will become mainstream. In my opinion, yes. It’s more a matter of “when” than if. I don’t know what are the steps needed to get there, and when this will happen, but it will happen. Notice that I’m not talking about “VR” anymore, because as I’ve said before, pure VR is now only a niche, and most headsets have become hybrid XR. This hybridization will continue over time, and the two technologies will go on together.

I’m sure of my answer for a few reasons. One is that now XR is too big to fail: all major tech companies are working on it, in one way or in another. We are simply too committed to abandon it.

The second is that I see the growth that happened in the last 8 years, and I can imagine we’ll have a similar evolution in the following years, which will bring a lot of changes and a lot of new users. The companies that are working in XR are trying many different routes and form factors (think just about Meta which has the Quest line, the Rayban Stories, Project Nazare glasses, Project Aria, and even mobile AR with SparkAR), and one of them will finish sticking. Think also about how Rayban Stories made wearing smartglasses in the street cool… it was unthinkable when Google Glass came out.

The third is that I see the value. I’ve tried in XR things I totally loved: I had emotions in XR no other technology could give me. I saw how companies are already using it effectively. There is value in this technology, and the more we will go on, the more people and institutions will find value in that. It all depends on finding the right form factor, cost, and content… but many people can find value in this technology.

The fourth is that I see the future and the convergence. The stupidity of the metaverse hype was that people hyped over a concept they couldn’t understand, and just wrote a lot of articles without knowing what they were saying. The “metaverse”, ignoring all the definitions, is the vision of how much of the technologies we are seeing growing today (digital worlds, immersive realities, 5/6G, AI) will shape our technological future. A future in which we will all live in a constant mixed reality… a future that is already happening now, where people commonly use AR filters to modify their real face or meet in a digital world like Fortnite to have fun together. The digital world helps us in overcoming many of the physical limitations of the real world, and we are already enjoying all of this. As Tim Sweeney says, 600M people are already in virtual worlds (Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc…), and millions of people use smartphone AR every day.

XR will just help in breaking the wall of the screen and put all of this around us. It is the natural consequence, because a lot of times the display form factor feels like a limit: we all know the frustration of seeing people just in 2D in our Zoom calls (it is alienating) or of following instructions on Google Maps and getting lost because they were not clear. XR will be there to improve this. We have already a lot of ingredients to make the “metaverse” happen. We just don’t know when they will be mixed up the right way and will have cooked for enough time to create a good cake.

Or better, we know: it’s always in “5 to 10” years like all experts like to say… 😉

(Header image by Lenovo)