THE WAIT

I was at F8 this year and am very happy that the Oculus Quest is now ready and will be shipping on May 21st. I have much hope and expectations that the Quest will make Virtual Reality (VR) popular with people en masse. High-quality VR is something which everyone should be able to experience. The fact-of-the-matter is that there is currently very little opportunity for people to experience high-quality VR that is not gaming-related.

Having been in the Spatial Computing industry for the last 5 years, I have gone to numerous conferences and festivals that have non-gaming VR exhibits. Usually the better the event, the higher-quality the VR experiences are. At these events, inevitably, most people who attend cannot view the VR experiences there. Why? Either because scheduling systems are not used to time when people can view the experiences or the tickets sold for the exhibit space are grossly oversold. If I had to rank which problem is less culpable it is the first one – that scheduling systems are not in place or are inadequate. In terms of overselling tickets, would this ever be done with patrons who buy tickets to see a movie in a movie theater? Of course not!

These issues are compounded by the fact that most VR experiences that are shown at conferences and festivals are not available online to be downloaded. So, we have companies that spend hundreds, if not millions of dollars in creating experiences that almost no one will be able to see! Does that make any sense?

I do see a future when the issues of VR distribution have been solved so that high-quality non-gaming VR experiences can be viewed and companies who create those experiences are able to make money from those views. Before then, the fact that these experiences are created for the few who view them strikes me as very strange and frustrating of progress.