Narrative: AR vs VR
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
HTC will launch mobile VR device as follow-up to Vive – CNET (Feb 15, 2017)
I covered HTC’s Q4 results yesterday, and it was clear that VR was not yet making a big positive dent in the business yet. Part of the reason is that Vive, like Oculus Rift, is a marginal play – it relies on heavy duty existing hardware and is itself expensive. It’s no coincidence that the top selling VR headset today is Samsung’s Gear VR, with over 5 million units, because it’s compatible with many smartphones and costs very little. HTC is smart to move into this territory too, though of course if this device really is limited to one of its own smartphones, that’s a pretty small addressable market too.
via CNET
Tim Cook Enthuses Over Augmented Reality – The Independent (Feb 10, 2017)
This is probably the meatiest commentary we’ve had on augmented reality from Tim Cook yet, though he’s spoken enthusiastically about it in the past. Read the last two paragraphs from this interview for the full take, but it’s worth pulling out several points: Tim Cook likes AR over VR because it keeps you in the world rather than taking you out of it; it’s for everyone rather than a niche (by implication, unlike VR, which is most exciting at present for hardcore gamers); it’s as big a deal as the smartphone, and yet not a product but a feature or capability – he likens it to the silicon in the iPhone; and it’s going to take a while before it’s ready for the mainstream (which you can take as meaning it isn’t coming to the iPhone or Apple products just yet, or that it’ll be a niche technology even when it does – the former seems more likely, but who knows.) Lots to chew on here, but for me the silicon comparison is the most interesting – that strongly implies we’ll see this in an iPhone rather than a headset from Apple in the near term.
via The Independent (UK)
Magic Leap engineers scramble to finish prototype ahead of February board meeting – Business Insider (Feb 8, 2017)
This and the earlier reporting from the Information and others on Magic Leap have been so powerful precisely because the company combines secrecy and slightly outlandish claims about its future products, which just begs reporters to investigate and dig up this kind of dirt. Magic Leap has almost zero control over its narrative because it refuses to provide any concrete evidence to the broader world about the progress it’s making on its product, while evidence is mounting on the other side that the product is nowhere near ready. The same phenomenon can affect established companies too in areas where there’s widespread reporting about future business the company itself hasn’t commented on – see Apple’s car-centric Project Titan. In the case of Magic Leap, there are quite a few people who say they’ve seen a live demo which was impressive, but one of the key questions continues to be whether the company can deliver that experience in the form factor it claims to be working on, and this story casts some doubt on that idea. I’m not sure there’s any way for Magic Leap to turn the narrative around here unless it starts opening up significantly, something it seems unlikely to do.
via Business Insider
Facebook closing 200 Oculus VR Best Buy pop-ups due to poor store performance – Business Insider (Feb 8, 2017)
One of the biggest challenges VR faces at this point is suggestions that it’s somehow failing to take off despite a big push into the mainstream, and that’s a narrative Business Insider has pushed before. This is where narratives are dangerous – the fact here is that VR is that VR is still in its infancy as a mainstream technology – other than the mobile flavors, it’s expensive, requires other expensive hardware, and there’s not a ton of content there beyond gaming. But if the narrative instead becomes that it’s fizzling as it attempts to break into the mainstream, that is a lot more damaging than merely talking about a technology that has small but growing adoption. VR can, however, already be fairly compelling as a demo, which is why it’s a blow that Facebook is closing these Oculus demo stations, because VR is really impossible to grok without trying it in person. But those trying to sell VR have to be very careful not to oversell it to mainstream users – it still has quite a long way to go before it crosses the chasm, and making it seem bigger than it is feeds this dangerous narrative.
via Business Insider
Facebook Loses $500 Million Virtual Reality Headset Verdict – Bloomberg (Feb 1, 2017)
I’ll have more on Facebook earnings shortly, and this is bound to come up, but this is a big loss for Facebook financially as well as embarrassing for some key figures from Mark Zuckerberg through the Oculus employees who were directly impacted in this verdict. Facebook will no doubt appeal, so this isn’t settled yet, and it only adds the equivalent of a quarter of the original purchase price to the $2 billion Facebook spent on Oculus, but it’s not chump change. Given how little revenue Oculus is likely to generate in the near term, this will put the acquisition further into the red for the time being. There are also eery echoes here of the Winkelvoss case against Zuckerberg himself, which of course was settled before a verdict like this was reached. Certainly not how Facebook would want to go into what looks at first glance like a really solid set of earnings.
via Bloomberg
Snap Is Working on Smarter Lenses (AR) — The Information (Feb 1, 2017)
AR has seemed an obvious area for Snap to invest in, given its focus on cameras and camera-centric experiences, and its existing Lenses product. So it’s not that surprising to hear that the company is working on AR-style lenses for something other than mere selfies, using the rear-facing camera. It sounds fairly basic for now, and very much in keeping with the idea of superimposing objects onto the real world for taking and sharing pictures. But of course once the technology is there it could theoretically be repurposed for other things too, including a potential future version of Spectacles with AR capability which would overlay virtual content onto the real world seen through its glasses. Lots of potential here, and as ever it’s still very early days in AR (and in the broader AR/VR battle).
via The Information
HTC’s top Vive designer is leaving to work on Google Daydream – The Verge (Jan 26, 2017)
It’s musical chairs week in VR, with Hugo Barra leaving Xiaomi to head VR at Facebook, and now an HTC designer moving to Google to work on Daydream VR there. This is one of the hottest areas in tech, and it’s therefore no surprise that it would prompt moves between companies as ambitious people try to find roles in the sector. For HTC, which continues to struggle mightily on the smartphone front and has only a side business in VR, it may become increasingly difficult to attract and retain talent in the face of an onslaught from some of the biggest names in the business.
via The Verge
Facebook has hired former Xiaomi and Google exec Hugo Barra as its new virtual reality chief – Recode (Jan 26, 2017)
Earlier this week, Hugo Barra announced that he was leaving Xiaomi, and now the other shoe has dropped – he’ll be taking over as head of VR at Facebook. It looks like that will make him effectively CEO of Oculus, though I wonder whether he’ll also be responsible for some of the less platform-specific stuff Facebook is working on, like taking Facebook’s social experiences into VR (Mark Zuckerberg’s post about the news features a picture of him and Barra – still in China – together in such a VR environment). Facebook certainly wants to have a major stake in the next user interface, and sees that as VR, but also seems realistic about the fact that no one platform – Oculus or otherwise – will have a dominant role there, and so it needs to evolve Facebook for VR in a way that works on lots of different systems. Whether or not Barra will run this broader set of VR activities at Facebook, hiring him is a big coup for the company – he’s a well-known and well-respected name, especially among developers.
via Recode
I was a VR skeptic (and then my 7-year-old son gave it a try) – GeekWire (Jan 21, 2017)
This is a fun little piece, and strongly mirrors my experiences with my own kids. To some extent, every new gadget or screen-based experience is appealing to them, but VR does have a certain extra something – I think the immersiveness is a big party of that. The reality is that VR is one of those things that’s really hard to take seriously until you try it, but once you do try it, you immediately see potential there. The problem right now is that lots of people are probably having these Day 1 / Day 2 experiences with VR, but there really isn’t enough content out there right now for Day 3 onwards – the novelty wears off fast. Hopefully, it’ll come in time, but a lot of the challenge for VR is that many people will never get the first experience with it this 7-year-old had, and even those that do will quickly run out of things to watch.
via I was a VR skeptic (and then my 7-year-old son gave it a try) – GeekWire
What happened to virtual reality? – Business Insider (Jan 21, 2017)
This piece argues that VR is currently underperforming expectations, and hasn’t panned out the way many of its proponents hoped. In reality (no pun intended), I think most of the companies have been pretty realistic about the prospects for the current generation of VR technology – Facebook in particular has said it doesn’t expect Oculus sales to be material to its overall financial picture, for example. So this is as much about inflated expectations around VR that came from others – observers, proponents, fans – than from the companies themselves. But in some ways that doesn’t matter – the narrative was that VR was finally here and going mainstream, and now it’s becoming that VR is falling short of expectations. The first was misguided, and now the second flows from those misguided expectations rather than from actual performance in the market. VR is still at a very early stage, and though Samsung has sold 5 million mobile VR headsets, it’s mostly still a niche proposition today, limited largely to the hardcore gaming market. It’ll take both technological advances and much more compelling content to appeal to non-gamers.
via What happened to virtual reality? – Business Insider