What else is needed for virtual reality to really take off?
MIXED reader Brian Slinger wanted to know what it would take for VR to truly become mainstream. Here is our answer.
Every Monday, we answer a question from our readers. Send your question to tomislav@mixed.de with "Question" in the subject line, and with any luck, we'll answer it the following Monday.
This week's question comes from Brian Slinger:
What would it take, in your opinion, for VR to truly achieve mass adoption? What's missing?
Hello Brian,
Let's first take a look at where virtual reality is today.
Meta has sold well over 20 million Quest units, but the more important question is how many people are using the devices on a regular basis. The VR platform had about 6 million monthly active users in October 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal report, though more recent numbers aren't available.
It is doubtful that the number of active users has reached ten million or more, but even if it has, it shows that virtual reality is still far from being a technology that many people use actively, especially outside its largest market, the United States.
What does mass adoption actually mean?
The question, of course, is how do we define mass adoption? Are we talking about 50, 100, 500 million active users, or even something on the order of smartphones? The answer would be different for each of those numbers.
I don't want to commit to a specific number, so I'll put it this way: VR will be adopted by the masses when it is useful in people's everyday lives and outperforms other technological devices in terms of usefulness, rather than being primarily entertainment.
Meta Quest does not do this yet. Currently, the most popular uses for the headset are gaming, social, and fitness. Games are entertainment. While the latter two applications can be considered useful in a strict sense, there are numerous alternatives to VR headsets. The added value of VR is not great enough for the masses to be social or exercise primarily in VR headsets.
VR headsets need to become full-fledged computers
I believe that VR headsets will not be ready for mass adoption until they mature into lightweight, easy-to-use, general-purpose computers that allow you to do your work more efficiently than other computers.
Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro are still a long way off. The devices must be significantly lighter and smaller (ideally less than 150 grams), provide a flawless view of the physical world, and establish an entirely new input paradigm that can replace touch input as well as mouse and keyboard.
If we look at where we are today, it is clear that we are only at the beginning of VR's evolution, and I would imagine that true AR glasses could achieve these critical features sooner than VR headsets, but we'll have to see.
Finally, I'd like to say that I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if VR headsets don't reach mass adoption, at least not to the extent that the majority of people use them on a daily basis. They can be a successful product and enrich the lives of many people without becoming the next big computing platform.
At the moment, the market is not there yet and is too dependent on Meta, but I hope that will slowly change over the next decade.
Kind regards,
Tomislav
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