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Lately, if you follow the social media feeds of many of the Tech News sites, there has been a rash of stories about how industry is having a tough go at getting people to adopt to Virtual Reality as a platform. Articles, like this one from Android Headlines , refer to VR as a dichotomy of the Tech industry that struggles somewhat in gaining massive levels of adoption. It goes on to suggest that one of the major barriers is that consumers have to “try before they buy” in order to understand VR.
My personal feeling on why VR is not getting the expected adoption goes into a lot more than just the try before you buy argument, and I thought I would take a moment to go into why I believe VR is not catching on.
Firstly, I am not going to fully dispute that “Try Before You Buy” is not a factor, because it totally is. Users need to know that they personally have a use case for a platform and they want to make sure that they can comfortably use said platform before they invest in it.
Investing in it, that right there is the true underlying detail that I believe is actually causing the resistance to VR adoption. If you look at the industry and the trends in computing, you will notice that people are shifting from Desktop and Laptop computers to more Tablets and Smartphones for their day to day computing use. In fact a Marketingland.com article () dated April 3 2016 states that 65 percent of digital media time is being represented by Mobile platforms.
People are moving away from the desktop platform.
This fact brings us to the cost of adoption, lets use one of the top VR platforms to look at this in more detail, the Oculus Rift. If a consumer is looking at the full Rift experience they are looking at having to purchase both the Rift and Touch controllers, a cost of $798 USD according to the Oculus Website. But wait there is also the fact that a user requires a PC with the following specs minimal
- Video Card NVIDIA GTX 960 / AMD Radeon RX 470 or greater
- CPU Intel i3-6100 / AMD FX4350 or greater
- Memory 8GB+ RAM
- Video Output Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
- USB Ports 1x USB 3.0 port, plus 2x USB 2.0 ports
- OS Windows 8 or newer
Researching one of the “Recommended” PC’s, the ASUS G11CD a consumer is looking at an entry price of $2,299 USD according to Intel’s website. This brings a end user’s up front investment to $3,097 USD in order to be VR ready BEFORE TAXES!
“But David”, I hear you saying about now, “I’m hearing lots of good about the idea of using your Smartphone with a VR Headset to get the VR Experience”, and to that I have to say, you’re right, you have, however there are some issues there too.
When getting into VR using Smartphones, the upfront cost of a headset can be minimal, with many Google Cardboard headsets coming in around $12-$30 at entry level, and even the Samsung / Oculus partnership Gear VR headset is a reasonable priced $99 USD.
However, here’s Where additional problems come in.
First, what if you are using a Smartphone that is not compatible with these options? the Gear VR is only going to be of interest to owners of, or those willing to move to the following Compatible Samsung devices. S7, S7 edge, Note5, S6 edge+, S6, S6 edge.
If you are using Android devices that are not on the Samsung list, your luck is a bit better as you do have the option of Google’s Daydream VR headset, but what if you happen to be on iOS and don’t wish to change to an Android device simply to use Virtual Reality?
Well in that case you are pretty much short on luck. You see iOS, since it does not have protocols in it’s operating system to support a “Mouse Pointer” means that you are left with little choices.
One of the best ones I have personally found is the inexpensive Mattel product The ViewMaster (a review on it can be found here ) , which is fully compatible with all apps that support Google’s Cardboard standard, but at the time I write this, there is little information available on if it will work with Google’s Daydream VR platform.
As a Web Designer, I do believe that Virtual Reality has a strong potential to change how end users interact with the World Wide Web, but as the original cast of Saturday Night Live used to be billed, it’s just not ready for Prime Time yet, and In My opinion won’t be until a cross platform, cost friendly option can be agreed upon and deployed.
Of course, this is just My opinion on the topic, Have your say and leave your comments below
Thanks for Reading, Dave - Inertial Zen Designs
