Perhaps "reality" is the problem with virtual reality

There are a lot of folks that are getting quite excited by virtual and augmented reality right now. Big investment from Facebook and Google, lofty forecasts of hundred of billion dollar markets emerging and the consumer launch of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive have fueled renewed enthusiasm for this 40 year old field. This time is different, they say, VR and AR will be the next big wave after mobile.

My interest in this is not just academic. My first company, Tapulous, was one of the very early iOS mobile company at it was extremely exciting and financially rewarding to be there early. It was fun to pioneer a new space and to test new business and revenue models, most of which came to form the foundation of mobile today. If VR and AR are the next platform, it makes sense as an investor, entrepreneur and business to understand what opportunities this might throw up.

So when folks started saying the 2016 has been the pivotal "iPhone" year for VR and AR, I set about to learn more about the space. I attended as many meetups and conferences as I could and gradually started to build a network in the space. I installed a couple of VR systems in my house and spend a good chunk of every day in the virtual world. I tested most every application I could get my hands on. I got excited - folks were talking about so many possible use cases in education, medicine, business connectivity, logistics, remote monitoring, etc etc. The investor in me started meeting new companies while the entrepreneur in me wanted to test new business ideas. I learned to code 3D environments and to quickly take a thesis and see how that translated to an actual VR environment. I was surprised by how easy it was to build something from scratch, even for someone like me who taught myself how to code in my spare time.

I quickly became convinced of two things. First, these two platforms (VR and AR - which are not at all similar, more on that in another post) will be big new platforms. I'm 100% certain of this, particularly in the case of AR. But, second, the more time I spent understanding these platforms to more I came to appreciate that we are still a few years away from that iPhone moment.

I want to speak pragmatically about some of the hurdles to overcome before these platforms really take off.

1. TECHNOLOGICAL "REALITY"

When the iPhone launched in 2007, and added the capability to install other apps in 2008, there was nothing about it that was a first. Touch screens, internet functionality and 3rd party applications had been around for a long time. But with the iPhone, for the first time these three things all came together in one device at a time when cost of providing data was also dropping precipitously. At that point there were no major impediments to widespread consumer adoption. In fact, the iPhone has changed relatively incrementally since 2007, simply getting a little more powerful in order to power richer apps, slightly more pixel-rich in order to present a crisper image, and slightly better cameras to take better pictures.

For VR, both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive that launched this year are quite capable devices but still lack several features that are necessary for widespread adoption. The AR space doens't yet have a consumer launch (Microsoft is piloting its Hololens) and other companies are focused on what can be done on a consumer's existing mobile.

Some of the limitations to date:

• Price: Oculus and Vive both require expensive CPU and GPU processors to have an optimal experience. The total investment of over $2000 is well beyond the purchasing power of average consumers. AR devices are even more expensive (north of $5000), with the exception of using the ubiquitous mobile phone as a display screen.

Image courtesy of Flavio Ensiki @ Flickr

• Pixel depth: For demoing and gaming on these devices, the resolution is perfectly acceptable. The problem is for B2B use cases where you want to display text in the devices for a long period of time. For example, to provide annotations for a medical app or descriptions for an item in a VR store. Here pixel resolution really hurts in that for text to be readable it would have to be quite large. So various ideas such as building Bloomberg trading monitors or NewRelic monitoring tools in VR just really are not feasible at this stage. To get a sense of what is required to approximate the natural world - the fovea of our eyes can discern 200 pixels per degree which translates to 2.5 giga pixels, or more than 6 times a 4K display.

Image courtesy Agnes @ Flickr

• Portability: All consumer devices currently on the market are heavy, claustrophobic and tethered by many wires which makes it difficult to use them for a long period of time. While you can pull your phone out to use in a few seconds, jump into a VR or AR session can talk time and persistence. Even using your existing phone with Google Cardboard requires you to carry around a bulky appliance to jump in. It's unlikely that these limitations will be solved in the very short term - no consumer wifi standard can transfer >5GB/second to power an eye-resolution VR or AR display which would allow the processor to be remote from the display device. Until then, early adopters need to develop a six sense in order to not trip over all the cables!

Gizmodo: A beautiful machine with one major flaw

2. USE CASE "REALITY"

I think one of the most important assumptions that should be challenged is the notion that virtual reality needs to in fact approximate reality at all! The history of technology is full of examples where humans have adapted to technology or technology has revealed new, more productive ways of performing a task.

We have now had natural language and voice search courtesy of Google and Apple for a couple of years, but how many of us are using it? It turns out that most technologically savvy folks are quite comfortable and competent in searching via keywords in a browser window, and are reluctant to go back to something more "real" like asking a question of the computer.

Image courtesy of Mauricio Peske @ Flickr

In the world of VR, a lot of attention is placed on just how "real" the virtual experience is? Companies like Virtuix Omni and Infinadeck have set out to create the perfect surface upon which people can walk or run to simulate that activity in the virtual world. The expectation is that if we can perfect this technology that consumers will flock to that device as it will create a more "real" experience. I get the temptation, but I fail to see how a whole generation of gamers who have actually ran more miles in Call of Duty pushing forward on a controller are suddenly going to get off their sofas and start running! Their minds have already been hardwired to interface with controllers. Its not clear how the VR space will shake out, but if virtual reality makes it possible for me to fly, I'm not sure I would want to walk!

Application developers are also keen to create more "realistic" experiences to help you imagine better a product, environment, etc. Some of this is profoundly interesting - for example, AR apps that enable you to imagine what an empty apartment might look like with furniture, what different TV models might look like on your wall or what it might feel like to sit in a new car without having to visit the dealership.

Image courtesy of Ikea

But realism has its limits. Just because I could build a high definition virtual supermarket doesn't mean that consumers want to walk down aisles and browse products. While product search (for example keyword + vertical scroll on Amazon) evolve the way it did because of technological limitations, it also turned out to be a pretty efficient way of finding what you want.

The flip-side of this problem is the opportunity - we do not yet know what type of interfaces will be productive in a VR or AR environment? Much of this is yet to be explored. Ten years ago we wouldn't have thought that the most intuitive way to turn on a device was to swipe from left to right, now children as young as two walk up to a television and attempt to turn it on this way. Mobile centered design started an a "port" of web design before it invented, developed and adopted its own design principles that were perfectly adapted to the platform.

When entrepreneurs and developers unlock themselves from the constraints of reality, the exploration that results is particularly interesting. For example, Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, has been exploring what would VR be like if we had an additional third arm to manipulate the virtual environment with. This might sound tremendously unnatural, but history has show us just how flexible the human brain is to unexpected changes. One famous experiment conducted by Professor Theodor Erismann, of the University of Innsbruck, 50 years ago had participant wear some glasses that turned the world upside down. What shocked the professor was just how quickly the participants' brains acclimatized to the new world! There is not necessarily a reason why that same wouldn't be true about a pair of new appendages!

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

I'm very excited about the space but sanguine about the challenges that remain both to have a device that meets that technological requirements for mass adoption and for developers to learn what makes for compelling experiences on these platforms. In the meantime, I think we will see VR and AR incrementally entering the consumer space, attacking slowly gaming in the case of VR and e-commerce in the case of AR. Meanwhile, the level of investment and interest in the space means that that "iPhone" moment isn't more than a few years off.

Andrew Lacy - 21 November 2016