Pal and fellow Linden Lab alum Reuben Steiger has a fun, publicly-accessible Facebook update asking fellow virtual reality industry vets to weigh in on the state of things ten years from now. Reuben and the rest of the people he's tagged in the thread worked on the cutting edge of VR ten years ago, when the tech industry was excited about Second Life as a virtual reality content platform and Reuben had just left Linden Lab to found Millions of Us, one of the first metaverse development studios. Weighing in within the thread are founders of the other two first metaverse studios, Sibley Verbeck (Electric Sheep Company) and Justin Bovington (Rivers Run Red), not to mention renowned technology evangelist Robert Scoble, who was instrumental in promoting Second Life back in 2006 and now, is the new generation of VR. (Scoble's prediction? "Sex robots.") With bonus appearances by IBM's VR evangelist Ian Hughes and Cisco's former virtual world advocate Christian Renaud, it's an epic blast from the virtual past.
Of course, some of us are using the thread to discuss the future of VR ten years hence:
Wagner James Au: 2026 will look quite a lot like 2016, just with much much better smartphones. AR will be a large niche category within that smartphone market (100 million), VR a smaller one within it (10s of millions).
Sibley Verbeck Simon: I 100% agree with this. The one caveat is if someone truly hits the nail no the head with a VR gaming device, it could top 100M, but the odds are against it in this timeframe IMO. The reason is lack of killer apps - the bigger behavior change or cultural acceptance change (which has never gone mainstream with even bluetooth ear pieces for phones), the higher utility the application must have in the eyes of someone who hasn't yet tried it. AR and VR both have very high bars as of yet to cross over for mainstream audiences, and haven't yet demonstrated much utility for those audiences, let alone convinced future users of it. Even if that is all solved by 2026, the adoption curve out to the majority of smart phone users will take several years at least.
Justin Bovington: Another perspective: 100k shipped units (Oculus) is not even a niche market; anything between you and the experience is a barrier; we await the killer app (as we did 10 years ago).
Lots more to dive into here. Seeing all these familiar faces in this context makes me realize that back in 2006, none of us would have predicted that 10 years from now, we'd be talking about the future of VR on a then-small social network for college kids. (As opposed to having it, in, you know, virtual reality.
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In 2006 who could foresee the disruption of 2007, when Steve Jobs held up that iPhone?
These are the sorts of technologies that overturn entire markets. And at the time of the iPhone announcement, I recall wags saying "oh, it's just a iPod with a phone. Big deal!"
I do not think VR will be the disruption that many techno-evangelists claim; it will be a profitable niche. Most disruptive tech comes out of nowhere or does what Jobs did: releasing something we did not know we wanted. We had smart phones before iPhone, but to my knowledge nothing that quite pulled all the functionality together. I put down my Palm V and never looked back.
Posted by: Iggy | Thursday, August 18, 2016 at 07:52 AM
a better full body VR interface, with full physics haptic feedback, with limited anti-gravity pad, think of a holographic version of movie 3d animation using real actors. With AR holographic menus and inventories. Yeah it's a pipe dream but it's a wish
Posted by: jaquaw | Saturday, August 20, 2016 at 11:08 AM