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0 pointsswaggyBoatswain7y ago0 comments

VR is overhyped, its use cases are more niche than people are led to believe.

For entertainment, real-estate previews, watching movies together, the experience, learning & simulation, and art modelling its great, but other than that not really. VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.

If someone wanted a VR social experience, we've had MMOs for ages. VR social might as well be a VR gaming MMO. It needs to provide a medium to spur social interactions. That market is not very big, although Roblox (10MM average users) would be an interesting market to look at to see where that goes. Your market segment in VR social is going to be smaller than an MMO, which tops at around at 10MM as well. Instagram has 800MM users. Population of america is 300MM+. Put numbers in perspective, its a niche market and won't ever be big. To make a profit, you would have to dump an incredible amount of investment in comparison to making a simple CRUD app. RoI needs to be justified.

VR has already been around for 15+ years, I grew up playing VR games at Disney as a kid. This market is not new. VR is only fun for certain games as well, generally the same games that made Wii and Xbox kinect fun.

Even if VR/AR became entirely portable and seamless, its still not going to have widescale adoption. You can't replace real life.

VR's biggest profit potential is towards small niche groups of people with alot of money to throw around. Much like the mobile game market works, only a few users contribute 90%+ of sales citation needed. Currently, DoD is using VR/AR for leadership & simulation & hypothetical scenario training, because mistakes / setups are expensive and cost lives.

VR gaming will never be a big market until the cost of equipment goes down. And frictionless setup / no context switching. Its still a very high barrier to entry, and a high cost to maintain.

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mattnewport7y ago

> VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.

This is not out experience using VR chat for some of our meetings. We're a fully remote team building a VR product so we're in a somewhat unique position where all our employees have high end VR gear and we have a big need for effective remote collaboration and communication.

A big advantage of VR over voice or video conference calls is being able to see where everyone is looking. This makes for smoother flowing conversations as you're able to look at someone when you pause and want their input. It's a real advantage over video conferencing. This is true even with very primitive avatars that don't reflect any facial expressions. Being able to collaborate around virtual objects in the environment is also useful in some situations, although virtual whiteboards are still quite primitive in most apps. Social VR is a very different experience from an MMO played in a 2D window.

The hardware cost will continue to come down but it's already not a major barrier for many enterprise use cases. Is certainly not a top concern for our customers.

swaggyBoatswainOP7y ago

Fair point I did not consider VR collaboration and idea incubation for enterprise level applications, where details have a higher priority.

My only counter argument to VR chat for enterprise level applications is four fold:

1. Its synchronous, like any conference call. Async is still going to be the main form of communication (Slack, git issues, email, etc). Synchronous communication has a higher weighting on just communicating ASAP with frictionless joining, since time lost is expensive for any company. That time lost comes from putting on your rift, turning it on, navigating to the meeting, minor details like that etc. It might really be minimal issues at best if your team is used to it.

2. Replaying VR, or even 360* videos. Information hides in a 3D plane as opposed to just everything displayed on a 2D screen. Mostly for people that did not attend the conference video / webinar etc. I don't know about you but I watch many of my videos at 2x playback speed. That would give me nausea

3. The advantages you are getting in VR over a traditional video conference call aren't that high. You would know more here, do you really value facial expressions and social cues over a simpler environment without 3d head set?

4. People remoting in need to have a VR set. That eliminates your coffee shop / travel nomad employee, is he really going to be carrying VR gear around? Of course he can just use chat / video, but still you want your work culture to embrace your ideals.

My counter argument to VR chat to general social everyday use, is primarly to cost / portablility / mass adoption / convenience. But these will get better over time.

It definitely has applications for things with your SO/best friend who lives in a different city, I can definitely see the appeal in that.

...I might have overstated myself here at least on that statement

mattnewport7y ago

I think as a fully remote company doing VR development we're "living in the future" a bit. It's a possible if not inevitable future at least. We use a mix of technologies to enable a remote team working across multiple time zones, some synchronous and some asynchronous: Slack, Zoom, email, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. We also make use of VR: Rec Room, Bigscreen, multi user functionality in our own app, etc. There's no one tool that does everything but VR apps are a useful piece of the puzzle for us.

As I mentioned, we all have high end VR gear and most of us have it at our desks and are already in and out of VR all day as part of our development work. The use case for our project also benefits from us having capable portable setups so yes we do have people joining VR meetings from Starbucks but I don't expect that to be a mainstream thing for a while until the tech improves.

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0 pointsswaggyBoatswain7y ago0 comments

VR is overhyped, its use cases are more niche than people are led to believe.

Even if VR/AR became entirely portable and seamless, its still not going to have widescale adoption. You can't replace real life.

VR gaming will never be a big market until the cost of equipment goes down. And frictionless setup / no context switching. Its still a very high barrier to entry, and a high cost to maintain.

0 comments

mattnewport7y ago

> VR social chat is not going to be a big thing, even after gen-Z. People tend to forget what social chat is for, communication. VR just adds no value to that process.

The hardware cost will continue to come down but it's already not a major barrier for many enterprise use cases. Is certainly not a top concern for our customers.

swaggyBoatswainOP7y ago

Fair point I did not consider VR collaboration and idea incubation for enterprise level applications, where details have a higher priority.

My only counter argument to VR chat for enterprise level applications is four fold:

My counter argument to VR chat to general social everyday use, is primarly to cost / portablility / mass adoption / convenience. But these will get better over time.

It definitely has applications for things with your SO/best friend who lives in a different city, I can definitely see the appeal in that.

...I might have overstated myself here at least on that statement

mattnewport7y ago

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse