I can still remember the first time that I experienced the web, which was on a workstation in a lab at MIT in late 1993 (Mosaic had come out in January of that year). The experience of easily accessing remote content and navigating from one site to another simply by clicking on a link was transformative. I remember how for several years after that there was a stark difference in attitude about the potential of the web between people who had experienced it and those who had only read about it in an article.
Something similar is likely the case today for Virtual and Augmented Reality. Experiencing it firsthand will change your view of the technology’s potential. I am fortunate to be able to afford the currently still expensive setups and have ordered a bunch of them to play around with at home. The first that we set up is the HTC Vive. Here is a short video of our son Michael experiencing the initial demo:
I have more videos from the same day of others with similar reactions. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a transformative experience.
That doesn’t mean though that VR/AR will have a massive impact over night. Instead, we are in the early days and much like the early web the hype is well ahead of the reality. Several hurdles will need to be overcome, including the high price of devices, the wonkiness of setup, the dearth of native content. On the high price of devices it is not just the Head Mounted Displays and Hand Controllers, it is also the hardware driving those. Michael had a 3 year old mid tier gaming PC and it was not up to the task without a fairly substantial upgrade.
I should also add that it is quite unclear what the startup and investment opportunities will be. The hardware side seems well taken care of by large incumbents. VR games will likely be expensive to produce, although there could be cheap breakouts along the lines of a Minecraft. On the tooling side Unity seems formidable but there could be opportunities for environments aimed at VR and AR applications other than games.
For instance, as a longtime scifi fan, the thing I am excited about the possibility of multiplayer worlds. The effort to check out here is High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale’s new startup. What is particularly exciting is that they have chosen a route in which different worlds can be hosted on different servers and have made the software open source. Getting High Fidelity to run on our home setup will be one of my next experiments.
But if you have a chance to try it, either as someone fortunate enough to be an early adopter, or by trying in a store or visiting a friend, I highly recommend it. I will post more updates on the Vive and also on other devices (I am waiting for an Oculus Rift and a Samsung Gear VR to arrive). I am also hopefully in line for Microsoft Hololens and will see if I can get myself to Florida for a Magic Leap demo.
