Is Virtual Reality marching towards a bigger debacle than 1990s?

Will 2016 take revenge of all the failures that Virtual Reality faced in 1990s ?

What if I tell you that HTC, Oculus, and Google are not the original inventors of Virtual Reality Headsets. Not even Sony who released Glasstron in 1997, which came with an optional positional sensor that allowed users to view the surroundings with a deep sense of immersion.

It was Future Vision Technologies (FVT) who came up with the First VR Headset in early-1993. FVT produced world`s first commercially available Virtual Reality Headset, Stuntmaster Head Mounted Display (HMD) and sold it under license by VictorMaxx at $219.95.

I am sure there will be couple of 50, 60, 70 years old people who might have felt Deja Vu as soon as they read this quote from Mark Zuckerberg and I don`t blame them because this is the exact same feeling that Management of Future Vision Technologies, Forte Technologies, Sega, and Sony went through in 1990s. They all built VR Headsets with great immersive experience for the gamers and planned to sell them anywhere from $200 to $650 but stopped all the efforts due to various challenges. Some companies stopped after developing prototype, some ceased to exist after developing 1st or 2nd version of the headset and some moved into other safe Consumer Electronics spaces. Some claimed motion sickness and severe headaches in users to be the prime reasons. Some claimed that VR effect was too realistic and users might move while wearing the headset and injure themselves. Some claimed primitive technologies, limited number of games, size and weight of the headsets and slow processing speeds to be the prime reasons. Some claimed that world was not quite ready for such 3D immersive technologies.

Fast forward to 2016, we again have multiple prototypes and commercially available VR headsets. Google, Microsoft, Oculus, Sony and HTC developed VR Headsets with varying capabilities and prices and have already shipped almost 40 Million headsets worldwide. Already major motion pictures likeStar Wars, Insurgent, The Martian, and Jurassic World have created VR experiences to strengthen their marketing efforts and brand positioning. Various analysts forecast VR Market size to be anywhere from $20B to $35B by 2020. Experts believe that VR will have such a huge impacts on Entertainment, Tourism, Pornography, Healthcare, Education industries that it`ll be impossible to imagine a day without VR HW and SW. Some interesting applications of Virtual Reality that I see in the near future are:

1. Obviously, Gaming and Pornography
2. Talking to the deceased relatives/ friends through combination of VR and AI
3. Testing and buying cars/ cloths/ homes etc
4. Taking Video Selfies (Velfies) while being in the VR world
5. Having a Virtual interactions with the newborns to keep them engaged
6. Touring various countries virtually and bluffing wives that you gave her a world tour ;-)
7. Partying with friends/ relatives virtually

So, what does Google Trend say about this 2nd VR wave. I looked for Google trends for Virtual Reality and compared them against that of Smartphone considering that Smartphones are the current benchmark for innovation, growth and market penetration.

Based on the Goggle Trends, ‘Virtual Reality’, and ‘Smartphone’ had almost similar trends in 2004–2005. However, ‘Smartphone’ keyword picked up significantly in 2010 and beat ‘Virtual Reality’ by a huge margin. Smartphone became a rage by 2010 and gave birth to thousands of companies supporting either HW, SW or Mobile Applications. Starting from 2015, Virtual Reality has started seeing the same kind of excitement and it`s continuously mushrooming with the new product announcements, videos and articles like this ;-)

Now the important question is, why 2016 will not be 1990s and how it won`t repeat failures of 1990s. I believe following table will help answering how 2016 resolves concerns of 1990s:

Technology has improved by leaps and bounds in last 20 to 25 years. Supportive infrastructure such as high density and performance chips, graphics cards, materials, Software, development community, games, mobile applications, videos, user adaptability that we have today is unparalleled. Creating Virtually Reality experience was a great idea in 1993 when FVT demonstrated VictorMaxx in CES and it`s a great idea now when Oculus released Rift in March, 2016. I believe it was all about the timing and infrastructure. I`ll leave you with the following table to analyse how much VR Headsets have improved in features and technology.

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