The State of Virtual Reality
(circa Dec. 2016)
By
Charlie Fink
Explore what you can buy, what you can do and who you can be.
The broad range of things we call Virtual Reality (VR) are rapidly maturing following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus. As if a switch were flipped, the tech world recognized (or re-recognized) the potential for VR to disrupt computing, gaming, and social media. Hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists and venture capitalists have created a virtual VR explosion. Computing and the internet have changed the world over the past 25 years, but we don’t yet have the juice to power a high-def, real time, massive multi-user virtual world where we can interact with each other and AI characters. There is no question that we will, perhaps sooner than anyone thinks.
IMAX is developing VR attractions for it’s theaters. Theoretically, consumers should have access to much better technology in public spaces than at home. I wish them luck, because the economics are extremely challenging.
To navigate the rapidly expanding VR universe, you need to move at 90 frames per second (fps) to avoid nauseating lag users often experience wearing a headset with insufficient frame rates. By comparison, movies require 24 frames per second, video 30 fps, and IMAX 60 fps. Users with a high end PC can almost get there today, and Google and Facebook engineers are working to address the lag issue for smaller PCs, laptops and smart phones. Promising solutions seem close at hand. Imagine shopping in a virtual store, or walking around virtual Paris, or being the QB of an NFL team. As VR reaches it potential to provide experiences, the commercial VR gold rush will reach the tipping point. Perhaps it already has. Investment banker Goldman Sachs estimates VR hardware sales will reach 25 billion dollars by 2025 (that’s just 8 years from now), eclipsing the market for both desktop computers and video games.
In the 1990s, I was the chief operating office of VR gaming pioneer Virtual World Entertainment (VWE), which used flight simulator technology to network customers (we called them “pilots”) into a three dimensional world (like a desert planet, or the canals of Mars) where they could compete and co-operate with one another. Customers paid a dollar a minute to play these games in our themed futuristic arcade. Location Based Entertainment (LBE) was an emerging industry that never emerged, despite efforts from giants like Disney, which invested tens of millions of dollars in the effort. VWE had thirteen locations around the country when the retail group was sold to entertainment venue Dave & Busters (their flagship is in Times Square) which operated the simulators until 2005. The software team went to Microsoft to work on Xbox along with our genius founder, Jordan Weisman. Jordan created the world famous role playing game BattleTech, which was a multiplayer cash cow for the mega game company Blizzard/Activision, and was the main attraction at our futuristic arcades. He taught me you have to have a mission in the virtual world. To simply wander around exploring would get boring quickly. Role playing will be a very big element of the virtual reality experiences to come.
LBE is staging something of a comeback, and provides some interesting clues about where VR in the home may be headed. A new entrant, The Void, of Salt Lake City, is seeking to revive the public space VR business. IMAX is developing VR attractions for its theaters. Theoretically, consumers should have access to much better technology in public spaces than at home. Again, I wish them luck, because the economics are extremely challenging. You simply can’t put enough people through the system when they want to go there.
The Void is deploying some amazing VR technology in suburban Salt Lake City. Mall developers are dying to see LBE’s succeed, but build out costs, hardware, software and operating expenses make it very hard to recoup. The issue with public space VR is that there simply isn’t an audience except on the weekend, and there isn’t enough capacity to make up for slow weekdays.
There are six kinds of media trying to co-opt the term “virtual reality”, and journalists have been happy to use the short hand, though the differences between them are very big:
- Mutiplayer games
- 360 degree video
- Telepresence
- Augmented Reality
- Full Immersion VR
- Social VR
I plan a series of extended posts about each of these, but let me briefly summarize my thoughts for now:
Multiplayer Games
Multiplayer video games have been with us for some time. My kids loved to play “Goldeneye” on their Nintendo64 fifteen years ago. It was a classic hallway shooter, sort of a cyber game of tag. The world was a maze where the other kids lurked. It gave players a remarkable level of freedom to move within it. Hilarious side note: After your brother ambushes you, be sure to throw your controller aside and give him a pummeling IRL. Another favorite among the boys in my house was the morally reprehensible 3D “Grand Theft Auto”, a remarkably successful role playing game in which players carry out deadly underworld missions, sometimes with good reasons, sometimes not. The graphics were somewhat crude, and the AI characters comically limited, but the universe, the virtual world, in which players are free to move and act, is huge.
For gamers, as we see, immersion good enough to suspend disbelief is already here, and it’s about to get a lot better. Immersive VR, using headsets, hand controllers, and motion sensors will make these virtual places increasingly real. You can move at will and interact with objects and people in ways currently reserved to our physical world. The potential for this kind of experience can already be seen in the motion sensor based Nintendo Wii. Once the frame rate issue is resolved, the physical immersion of the Wii will be enhanced by a headset’s visual immersion. Clearly, there are insanely great things to come.
360° Video
VR headsets are really the simplest and cheapest way to be immersed in three dimensional media, but simply using a gyroscopic headset to observe 360 degrees of live action video is not virtual reality. Pioneers exploring the newly enhanced medium of 360 video, like Zeality, RYOT VR (Huffington Post), NYTVR (NY Times), to name but three, are desperate to co-opt the sexy name of the medium to better attract an audience and investors. 360 videos are suitably immersive, at least until you get used to the effect, but they do not happen in real time (critical to my definition of VR). Viewers get a better view of a real place, but can’t do anything else. You can’t move around. You’re lashed to the tripod. Google Street View provides way more choice (zoom, pan, tilt) than a 360 documentary video. Definitions aside, this is an exciting development in the technology of live action documentary. It is not yet truly virtual reality, with freedom to move and interact, but it’s implications are profound. The D.W. Griffith of 360 video may yet emerge, but from what I’ve seen so far I don’t think 360 video will become a viable platform for narrative storytelling anytime soon. More on this very big, very controversial topic later.
Telepresence
Micro cameras and instruments have revolutionized medicine, making invasive procedures much less necessary. Pilots in Nevada control drone missile platforms over Middle East targets, undersea ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) explore depths submersibles can’t, and the Mars Lander gives us a window on Mars, and wheels and arms to help us explore that distant, forbidding world. We call this telepresence. It can be greatly enhanced by the use of a headset, but it is not VR. The places we visit are real. We can interact with them by moving around and controlling real devices.
Augmented Reality
This is similar to VR because of its emphasis on a headset but that is not its minimum requirement. Heads up displays (HUD) have been projecting critical data onto car and cockpit windshields for some time now. Google Glass promised to augment reality but never fully delivered, as it was just a head mounted camera, but it would have been a great tool for players of Pokémon Go, who could use geolocation and the built-in camera to identify and capture (photograph) characters.
This is a must watch. What Google Glass AR should have been, and where we may be headed with wearable computing:
Snap (formerly Snapchat) just released its video glasses, Spectacles, to great fanfare. I’m not sure why people are calling this AR as it seems to be just a camera, but it is here today, and relatively cheap. It’s a stylish, relatively inexpensive riff on Google Glass. These sunglasses that can shoot up to a days’ worth of POV (point-of-view) video which you can then wirelessly upload to your Snap account. Everything about this screams youth culture (that is Snap’s brand, after all). Spectacles are even being retailed in colorful kiosks that move from place to place, gamifying the purchase experience. If you don’t want to bother with that gimmick, Snap Spectacles are on eBay at a slight premium.
Full Immersion VR
Perhaps still closer to science fiction than science fact is Full Immersion VR. The example commonly cited is the “Holodeck” from the “Star Trek” series. The holodeck provides R&R for crew members who need to walk through meadows, swim in lakes, play tennis and do other earth things to relieve the monotony of space travel.
Similarly, the HBO Series “Westworld” is set in a man made fantasy land where rich humans (it costs $80,000 a day to visit) cavort with cyborgs in an old West setting. Visitors fully inhabit in this fictional world where life and death have no meaning (like in a video game). The AI characters are so good you don’t know if you’re dealing with an android or human. The robots, or “hosts”, are programmed with stories to engage the human guests. The computing power isn’t here yet, but one day we will be able to play in a virtual “Westworld”.
Social VR
Facebook’s $2 billion dollar acquisition of Oculus set off this gold rush because suddenly everyone saw the big winner in the mass market VR sweepstakes could be one of the world’s most valuable companies. They will do this by creating a world where we can do everything we do in real life, only easier, better and more quickly. You’ll choose an avatar which may look like you, or your cartoon bitmoji, or maybe you want to be Brad Pitt, or a talking dog. In this new, penultimate Fully Immersive VR universe, you will work. Play. Shop. Exercise. Learn. Meet relatives, friends, or new people. Date. Touch someone. Visit new and favorite places. Play games. Attend a play or watch a movie. The only thing we probably won’t or can’t do is eat and visit the bathroom, although you never know, there could be an app for that. The Social VR platform will ultimately be the clothesline from which all your VR apps will hang. Facebook has no intention of sitting there like the old TV networks, helplessly watching all its users shift their time to a more compelling platforms. Remember Friendster and MySpace?
In subsequent articles I look forward to taking a deeper dive into each of these immersive new media platforms. Like the formative days of the Internet in the early 90s, opportunities seem endless. Entrepreneurs and big companies alike can’t afford to sit on the sidelines and wait.
Charlie Fink is an award winning producer and entrepreneur. His show “Who’s Your Baghdaddy?” opens in New York on April 6. Follow Charlie on Twitter @charliefink.
