Will ‘Ready Player One’ spark a VR Revolution?

NOTE: I’m writing this opinion based on my VR industry knowledge and having read Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One - not on the film which I’m seeing on 28 March. There are NO film spoilers and all views are my own.

Steven Spielberg’s new virtual-reality fantasy “Ready Player One” may help drive sales of VR headsets — which have fallen short of bullish forecasts — but not everyone thinks the movie will really be a tipping point. If the question is will this single film kickstart a VR revolution where millions of people leave their real lives behind and start to live in an alternate reality… SPOILER ALERT: I’m afraid that that answer is NO. The evolution and uptake of VR will be a gradual and then exponential curve, just like voice assistants, mobile phones, PCs and every emerging technology before it. I’ll go on to explain why and what businesses who are exploring VR need to know.

“Ready Player One,” which hits theatres March 29, takes place in a dystopian future where VR gamers are battling for control of a virtual world called the OASIS. It’s expected to earn between $45 million and $55 million over the four-day opening weekend. However, “Ready Player One” extensively showcases VR gameplay, so it could serve as a catalyst for the virtual-reality market, according to Jefferies equity analysts. In other words, the movie has the potential to be a mainstream cultural moment that fuels interest in VR the way the overnight hit of augmented-reality game “Pokémon Go” vaulted AR forward.

“We believe that the movie will drive sales of VR headsets that require high-performance GPUs [graphics processing units]” from chip-makers Nvidia and AMD, Jefferies wrote in a research note published Monday. “‘Ready Player One’ has the potential to appeal to an electronics-game savvy audience that is motivated to have a more immersive experience.”

However, the Spielberg-directed movie can’t change the bigger factors that have so far kept VR a relatively small niche in the entertainment biz and hampered adoption, other observers say. Those include the high cost of hardware and the “exclusive immersion” of VR, said Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital, an advisory firm specializing in VR and augmented-reality technologies.

“While ‘Ready Player One’ is great in terms of raising VR’s profile to drive consumer trial of VR systems in the short-term, it is not clear yet what impact this will have on VR’s long-term growth prospects,” Merel said.

Initial reviews of “Ready Player One” have been mostly positive. Rotten Tomatoes registers a critic’s score of 81% so far. Meanwhile, the movie has a 98% “want to see” user score on the website, representing the percentage of users following “Ready Player One” who added it to their want-to-see list.

Based on the book and watching ALL trailers, Ready Player One will have plenty of VR scenes that showcase fantasy combat and adventure in ways that are immersive and awe-inspiring. “‘Ready Player One’ tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the backstory is full of literally hundreds of references to 1980s pop culture nostalgia due to Halliday’s (the OASIS creator’s) obsession with that era. A clever trick by author Ernest Cline to keep our attention and make a distant future feel relevant to millennials and up.

Regardless of how well “Ready Player One” fares at the box office, VR sales so far have been underwhelming relative to early projections. That’s led to price cuts from HTC and Facebook’s Oculus, and Sony’s PlayStation VR for their standalone virtual-reality gear. Last year, around 9.6 million consumers in the U.S. — just 2.9% of the population — used a VR headset at least monthly, according to eMarketer, which forecasts that percentage growing to just 5.2% by 2019.

Sony is the market leader, having shipped 2.6 million units of its PlayStation VR. HTC Vive and Oculus Rift have shipped 950,000 and 850,000 units, respectively, according to Investor Business Daily. However 2018 brings a new wave of cheap, light, wireless VR headsets including the Oculus Go, Lenovo Mirage Solo, Dell, Samsung and many more of the major hardware makers. My prediction is that these will be the first devices that gain traction with mainstream users.

Like other analysts, Digi-Capital is far more bullish on AR than VR. By 2022, Digi-Capital projects, AR could represent a $85 billion to $90 billion market with a base of 3.5 billion users. VR, by contrast, might have 50 million to 60 million installed base and represent annual revenue of $10 billion to $15 billion by 2022.In the VR sector, entertainment — games, location-based entertainment and video — could represent two-thirds of all VR sector revenue, with hardware taking just over a quarter due to “limited unit sales and price competition,” according to Digi-Capital.

However, based on my experience I believe that employee training will be near-term breakaway use case across all industries. The ability to immerse employees in otherwise challenging situations, track their performance, and help them develop empathy for others is compelling and proven to be ready today.  Businesses will be able to rent VR hardware from consultancies and adapt courses from re-usable education content which will further reduce the costs and barriers significantly.

Therefore I think that Ready Player One may a turning point that raises awareness of VR to mass audiences and hopefully sparks discussion about how VR can improve skills, lives and relationships rather than isolating us.