Gathering Dust: Why Hasn’t VR Taken Off?

A couple of years ago, I bought a Meta Quest 2. A virtual reality startup was raising money, and I wanted to test their latest build.

The technology blew me away. I soared over the Grand Canyon and fulfilled my childhood dream of wielding a lightsaber. I also tested the startup’s app and found it dramatically improved my sleep habits.

Then, I did what most people do with VR headsets. I carefully arranged my Quest 2 in its storage case and promptly forgot about it. Even an industry trade publication admits that 69% of people use their headsets less than once per month.

It’s strange to have a technology that’s incredibly impressive yet utterly forgettable. That’s usually a recipe for a fad, but VR seems different. Why is there such a chasm between the promise of VR and our current reality?

VR headset designed by DALL-E

I don’t think we’re having the right conversations about VR. My Quest 2 isn’t gathering dust because it’s too large, heavy, slow, or expensive. It’s sitting in a box because it doesn’t solve a problem in my life.

The “killer features” of VR have yet to be fully discovered. If you ask me why we’ll all be wearing headsets in 2030, it boils down to three factors: privacy, complexity, luxury, and proximity.

Prying Eyes

I was a consultant before (mostly) retiring. I was on the road constantly and struggled to balance confidentiality and productivity. Protecting client data isn’t easy when working in airplanes, cafes, cubicles, and hotel lobbies.

When Apple Vision Pro launched, I immediately thought of the privacy implications. I pictured myself on an airplane, updating a presentation in one window and drafting an email in another — all without the passenger behind me reading over my shoulder.

I’m shocked consulting firms aren’t issuing VR headsets to new hires. How can you claim to take client confidentiality seriously if you won’t pony up a few thousand dollars to thwart shoulder surfing?

Then again, we all care about privacy. Think about the number of times a day you hide a computer, phone, or tablet screen from prying eyes. It’s practically a reflex. I closed my browser this morning to avoid an awkward conversation about why I was looking at a used Lamborghini Countach.

Lamborghini Countach poster designed by DALL-E

VR privacy extends into the digital realm. You can be anybody you want online. Your appearance, voice, language, and almost everything else can be altered in a virtual world. We’ll need identification to avoid deep fakes, but your digital fingerprint can be independent of how you present yourself to others.

Today, the stigma of wearing headsets in public overshadows any privacy gains. Sitting in a coffee shop with a $3,500 spatial computing device strapped to your face practically screams, “Look at me!” That will change as the novelty wears off. What remains will be a profoundly private computing experience.

There’s still work to do on VR privacy. The most glaring issue right now is user input. Designers seem to think virtual keyboards and voice assistants are the path forward, but the former is clunky, and the latter isn’t private.

Next time you’re in a public place, count the number of people looking at screens. Then, picture those people wearing headsets. Welcome to 2030.

Joyfully Complex

I stopped using my Quest 2 because I ran out of content. I don’t mean that I tried every app available. I mean that I hit a point of diminishing novelty.

Most of us take the complexity of the physical world for granted. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings available to us at any given moment are seemingly infinite.

I’m sitting in a cafe. I look out the window and see cars driving by and birds bouncing along the sidewalk. I hear a conversation about the upcoming Formula 1 race in Saudi Arabia. I smell the oddly satisfying aroma of espresso and cleaning supplies.

Digital worlds suck by comparison. I enjoyed chopping colorful blocks with lightsabers for a couple of hours. When the novelty wore off, I was left with a low-res version of real life.

I could venture down the gaming rabbit hole, but I want VR experiences without a side of psychological manipulation. I want my sense of wonder grounded in boundless complexity, not cheap parlor tricks for harvesting attention.

Humans aren’t building VR content quickly enough to reach parity with the physical world. Think about how many scans of the Grand Canyon you’d need to replicate the real thing. It took nature billions of years to construct the physical world.

Fortunately, we don’t need to build everything ourselves. We can use generative AI to automate much of the content creation. For example, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) may allow us to feed pictures of the Grand Canyon into a neural network and have it render a three-dimensional VR model. It won’t be a perfect reproduction, but do we care? Will you notice if a boulder is out of place?

We can even manufacture humans. Apple is taking flack for its first attempt at Personas. Nobody will mistake your Persona for the real you. However, could they tell the difference between a Persona controlled by you and one controlled by AI?

I’ve been building an AI version of myself using OpenAI’s assistants. It does a surprisingly good job of answering questions the way I do. How long until I can hook “Artificially Rob” up to a Persona that can attend Zoom meetings instead of me? A year? Maybe two?

Generative AI is a solution to VR’s complexity problem. Constructing digital worlds rivaling the real thing will take time, but we’ll have plenty of help from machines along the way.

Virtual Luxury

Imagine you could have every material possession and life experience you ever wanted. A house on the ocean. A fleet of luxury cars. Exotic vacations every weekend. All on a middle-class salary. That’s the promise of VR.

The market for luxury goods and experiences is exploding. Louis Vuitton isn’t only growing because rich people can’t get enough luggage slathered in obnoxious logos. The company also supplies the masses with an ever-expanding portfolio of “affordable luxury” products.

SOURCE: Quartr

There’s nothing inherently valuable about a Louis Vuitton iPhone case. It’s an overpriced hunk of plastic and leather. However, for the bargain price of $435, you can buy entry into the Louis Vuitton club. Millions of people find that value proposition attractive, whether or not they care to admit it.

Now, let’s revisit that Lamborghini Countach that I was eyeing. Only 2,000 examples exist, which has pushed prices over $500,000. That’s cheap for a car that adorned the walls of millions of kids in the 1980s and 1990s, but it’s way more than I care to spend.

I would, however, buy a VR Countach if it was close enough to the real thing. It could ship with a gasoline nasal strip to simulate the olfactory sensations of a carbureted V12.

Consumers lust after luxury goods and experiences. The VR versions don’t have to be perfect. We'll buy them if they deliver 90 value for 1 percent of the price.

Don’t believe me? The next time you’re in a crowded space like an airport or shopping mall, count how many Louis Vuitton items you see. Do you think even a fraction of them are authentic? As I said, 90 percent of the value for 1 percent of the price.

Quick Tangent: Digital Money

Ugh. I wanted to finish this article without mentioning crypto. But I can’t find a way around it. How are we going to buy these digital assets?

I’m bullish on blockchain. There’s a solid case for using the technology to track digital asset ownership and ensure creators get paid. I can’t have some rando driving around in my virtual Countach.

That doesn’t mean we’ll use Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, or any other cryptocurrency being hyped today. Paper money was a solution to a problem. Crypto is a problem that is looking for a solution.

So Close

Several years ago, I met with the executive team of a ski resort. We discussed all kinds of automation opportunities, largely focused on lowering costs. It’s not as easy as it once was to find twenty-somethings willing to work for peanuts and lift tickets.

The meeting was fine. Besides the view out the window, there wasn’t much to distinguish our conversation from hundreds of other automation and AI conversations with other companies.

Toward the end of the meeting, the CFO asked if there was anything we hadn’t covered. I thought for a moment and asked about VR. We’d spent hours discussing automation but hadn’t once talked about a technology that seemed to pose an existential threat to the client’s business.

The executive team didn’t seem interested, but that conversation has stuck with me. If I owned a mountain in the middle of nowhere, I’d be worried about the day when people no longer had a reason to visit.

Will VR skiing replace actual skiing soon? Probably not, but proximity will be a massive advantage when it does. I live in Chicago and go skiing once a year if I’m lucky. It’s a pain to fly out to Colorado or Utah for a few days on the mountain. That’s to say nothing of the risk that the weather doesn’t cooperate or — I don’t know — breaking a few bones.

Imagine VR skiing becomes good enough with respect to the sights and sounds of the mountain. Will that be sufficient to draw people away from ski resorts? What if local shops offer augmented capabilities like motion simulators, chilled rooms, and powder-filled air?

It’s the same story with my driving example. Do you think your brain can distinguish between a VR headset paired to a simulator rig or go-kart and driving an exotic car?

VR allows unique experiences to be reproduced locally. Maybe not in your home, but almost certainly in tailor-made rooms that provide the sensory inputs your headset can’t.

Will all this cost money? Sure, but so do the actual experiences. A ski weekend can easily cost a couple of thousand dollars. What if you could ski for half the price for an entire season and visit any mountain in the world? Did I mention you and your friends could be the only people on the slopes with you?

Reality Bytes

What will compel me to dust off my Quest 2? Nothing. It provided a few moments of awe before fading into the background of my life.

Apple Vision Pro is a step forward. Spatial computing offers a private user experience and tackles the complexity problem by augmenting virtual reality with actual reality. If you don’t think Apple is a luxury brand, ask yourself why Louis Vuitton doesn’t offer Android phone cases.

There’s a chance we’ll never overcome the limitations of VR. It could go the way of the tablet — a device for consuming content and not much else. If so, I’ll republish this article in a few years with “VR” replaced by “brain-computer interfaces.”

My point is that the form factor is in flux, but where we’re headed isn’t. The “killer features” of privacy, complexity, luxury, and proximity will eventually push us into digital worlds.

Is that a bad thing? Maybe. If you worry social media warps our sense of reality, wait until you see what companies can do when they control our full sensory experiences.

I‘m more optimistic. VR has the potential to solve real problems. Have you seen that picture of Mount Everest with hundreds of climbers waiting to reach the peak? Each of them risked their life, spent gobs of money, and burned thousands of kilograms of CO2 to be in that shitty picture.

I’m looking forward to a day when I can do the same for a few hundred dollars and have the view from the top all to myself. Oh, and throw in a Lamborghini Countach for good measure.

Source: New York Times