When in March 2014 Facebook bought the Kickstarter Oculus Rift, I believed that we were on the verge of a huge development. Facebook by then had done an amazing job in their acquisitions, with of course Instagram for 1 billion, which is estimated to be approximately worth 100 billion nowadays and Whatsapp, which was famously bought for 19 billion in February 2014.
However, after nearly six years the hype of the Ocolus rift has slowly died out, and something which was thought (also by me) to be a gamechanger for technology actually never seemed to deliver what was expected of it. Of course, VR has been used in many ways over the last few years, from VR fishing and Mario kart to actual employee training across a fortune 500 company. Still, one cannot really shake away the disappointment when thinking about the current state of the VR market, which hasn’t been able to move away from a niche market.
Apart from the numerous issues that haunt VR devices, which include cybersickness, Eyestrain, and the incredible high computing power needed to run the VR device a number of other technologies have gathered traction that could overtake VR. The two most known technologies are Augmented reality (AR), which combines the reality that we see with virtual elements and mixed reality (MR) a combination of the two technologies, which feels like the best of the two worlds.
Unfortunately for VR this is also what the market is expecting. Gartner, the company known for its famous yearly hype cycle predicted in 2018 that MR will overtake both VR and AR. As a fan of virtual reality, I sincerely hope this will not be the case, but it’s not looking good for VR, and one has to start thinking if VR might be just a trend, just as we saw with 3D tv’s between 2010 and 2018. A product that had to the possibility to become a game changer but could end up becoming nothing more than a niche.
References:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-25/value-of-facebook-s-instagram-estimated-to-top-100-billion
Gartner hype cycle 2018: Mixed reality to overtake VR and AR
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/3-reasons-why-vr-and-ar-are-slow-to-take-off/
Interesting to read! But isn’t it with all emerging/promising technologies right now? Several technologies that have been listed on different Gartner Hype Cycles (for emerging tech, for AI, for SMEs, etc) are believed to become a hype in the near future, but whether it will become dominant is yet to be experienced. AI, Blockchain, 5G, AI Cloud Services, Speech Recognition, Chatbots, etc. all of them are hyped now, but not one works to the extent we would perhaps want it to. To be very honest, I’m also not surprised that VR might perhaps stay a niche in the future.