Growing up in the Age of the Internet
The future of AR/VR is bright. We have a new culture where kids grow up in the age of the internet. Technology now is much more accepted than 20 years ago. This could be the main reason why the adoption of AR/VR is a lot higher now with this new generation. People are now used to living in this kind of digital virtual world, we have people living at home experiencing life through YouTube. That was something that didn’t happen before. People are already living in a virtual world, they are just not immersed in that virtual world. How many hours does an average kid play a video game? How many hours are they on YouTube? 8 hours a day? They have already accepted living in a virtual environment.
The Problem with VR Games
Games today are made for $50 million dollars plus. Then when they look to make a VR game, in order for them to actually give them the same quality game/experience, it will cost them more by default. So that means you need to get for that entire amount which is insane because you just don’t have enough users even if you sell each VR game for double the price.
Hyper-Reality
However let’s be real, the world does want a hyper-reality. If you look at the majority of people and how they live, most are just at home using the internet. For them, the applications of VR are huge. Of course, the question is how do you get some sort of resource out of them. This could be a kind of virtually working from home in a hyper-reality. You can see this now with YouTubers who are working at home and making their videos from home for other people who are also at home.
What hit the startups hard in 2015/2016 in the VR space was that Facebook moved way too slow. A lot of startups were expecting, for example, the headsets to arrive faster, the adoption to be higher, but Facebook postponed a lot of these things. There were a lot of startups like my startup Altergaze that were relying on Facebook for the launch of their games, apps, hardware, enhancement, whatever else they were building to actually have some kind of market. Hopefully, in 2018 we will really see the potential in VR.
