The VR and AR push of the last several years is at a crossroads. The PR wave that had helped create excitement is subsiding against the backdrop of disappointing technology, content, and adoption.
In the last several months the grand vision of useful Augmented Reality has been shelved in favor of fun photo-filters that are fleetingly engaging. And the VR dream has been dialed back in many cases—at least in the messaging from companies—from one envisioning lifelike, deeply engaging experiences to simpler experiences that require lower bandwidth and processing.
The question is whether anyone can figure out a use-case built on the current limited technology that will generate enough momentum to keep the technology wave alive. Or will the push for VR and AR suffer a similar fate of earlier attempts and dissipate?
People in the VR/AR startup ecosystem must ask what experiences are within reach that can be built on the technology as it exists today.
Here are a few of the most compelling answers I have recently heard.
VR: Single-Player Escapist Experiences—Kindle’s Revenge
Recently, in conversation with some young technologists, one said with complete sincerity that he thought that the killer application for VR was reading books. His argument was that e-books are wonderful, but the number one problem with the reading experience was the distraction of the real world. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to close off the world and focus on a book in a peaceful, well lit, serene environment?
Of course, it would be one of the ironic twists of history if the number one use of Virtual Reality became reading text. But it is far beyond the practical limit of current VR to deliver enough pixels per degree to make reading a pleasant experience.
But, the irony aside, there is something important—and currently contrarian—about the concept that VR could be best suited today for personal escape from the real world, assuming it would work with relatively low bandwidth and hardware requirements.
With things like meditation on the rise, increasing discussion of digital drugs, and an ever-noisier environment full of interruptions and push notifications, what if people started building VR experiences to escape all the noise of modernity—not to double down on it.
One of the main features of putting on a headset is losing the ability to glance at your phone. VR could grow up as our ultra-technological techno-escape space.
AR: Supercharged Geo-Filtered-Experiences—Foursquare’s Revenge
The traditional idea of Augmented Reality is even more technically difficult to achieve than Virtual Reality, so it was supposed to happen later. But, in the hype cycle of near-term mass Augmented Reality has a few things currently going for it.
First, it is relatively less bandwidth-intensive than VR. When you just have to draw a few pixels, not the whole world, some problems get harder, but you don’t need to pipe as much raw data. Second, if you think of a cell-phone camera as a window to the world, hundreds of millions of people already have hardware capable of some sort of augmented reality experience.
So far, the use-cases are mostly silly hats and the like. Which is fine for companies that are interested in purely driving engagement with photos. Occasionally it has also been argued that throwing pokeballs at pokemon was another breakthrough moment (for those who didn’t realize that the game is easier when you just turn off the camera).
I think, however, that the real value of AR in the near-term might be to add an accessibility layer on top of geo-location to make the experience more compelling. In essence, I think the AR camera platform’s real role will be to make the experience that Foursquare started building almost a decade ago now far more compelling.
One obvious example of how this would work would be personal photos. While companies have been putting your geo-tagged photos on maps for a long time, I think there would be more compelling about walking into a space, opening your camera, and being able to see all the photos you and others have taken of that space over time. The same thing goes, obviously, for old photos of a given person. It is somewhat surprising to me that neither Google or Facebook have released something like this yet.
Another related direction might be supercharging guided tours. Yesterday I was at SFMOMA, which has a lauded audio tour that uses exact geo-location within the building to explain the art. The stated goal of the app has been to deliver audio tours but if you told me in the near future I could point my camera at part of the artwork to get even more detail I would not be surprised. By no means is this a new idea, but it one which seems timely with the technological capacity we have in hand.
Content Discovery and Delivery—Blockbuster’s Revenge
One of the things which people really misunderstand about VR content is that creating 3D experiences is so bandwidth-intensive that most modern wired internet connections, let alone mobile connections, just can’t download high quality good content in any reasonable amount of time. It is too much data.
Even if great content existed, and people had the hardware to run it, few people could actually stream anything good over the internet without sacrificing a massive amount of resolution or being willing to wait for hours. So, as much as it would make sense that you would be able to watch sporting events from the front row over the internet sooner than later, you shouldn’t hold your breath.
It makes everything feel a lot like the 1990s all over again—or like countries in 2017 that have less-robust network infrastructure. And it means there may be an opportunity for someone to deliver a monthly hard-drive to your physical doorstep with the next batch of great VR content. Or, at a minimum, some sort of home-caching device that pre-downloads the content you might be interested in periodically so that it is available when you actually want to engage with it. Someone could re-start something like Blockbuster video, or the original mail-delivery Netflix.
To be sure, it isn’t clear exactly what this better content would be even with improved distribution. But, I am sure that there are at least a small number of people who would be interested in high-resolution 360 degree videos of sports and concerts—even if by watching them this way they would be a delayed and solitary experience.
I could imagine that in the very near future a very expensive niche content delivery service could evolve to bring this type of content home to some initial early adopters willing to pay a lot—and perhaps someday, like Netflix, evolve into a broader distribution platform.
In Search of a Killer App
In the long-run it is nearly unfathomable that Virtual Reality, and its cousin Augmented Reality, will not hold a very meaningful place in the technology landscape. The question in 2017, as it was in 2014, and frankly 1990, is when.
I have long been a skeptic because the killer app that can be created has always been unclear to me. I personally don’t think that the answer is social, using VR or AR to talk to others and connect. It would be nice if it was, because it is a great growth and adoption vector—but the value of AR overlays on selfies is much like the value of old-fashioned static filters—it fades rapidly with adoption. And I have little interest in spending time with friends in virtual space.
Perhaps, however, there is a less obvious and more powerful answer like those I suggest above—or something else out of left field.