The REAL Reason Virtual Reality Keeps Failing

for almost 100 years people have fantasized about living in a virtual world it's total submersion complete Detachment from reality people plugged into virtual reality that ignore the world around them you know for me this stuff is all about like helping people connect connect it's ingrained in us as humans to push the bounds of our existence constantly seeking New Heights and Horizons Facebook was so certain of our virtual future that they changed their name to meta for the metaverse and invested 96 billion dollars into VR technology even with all that money and effort the metaverse and virtual reality still refuse to succeed now meta failing to a point where the metaverse has become a joke but in the metaverse nothing can hurt me except massive Financial loss which they continue to take so a virtual reality truly is the future of gaming work education communication and more what's stopping it and will we ever experience a true virtual world pick a trek through a prehistoric jungle tour a house although humans have been developing VR technology for years it's not hard to see why it's failed in the past it wasn't until Nintendo's Virtual Boy in the 1990s that VR had any kind of foothold but the hardware was clunky The Experience limited and very few games were made for the platform not to mention everything was colored red and black that didn't mess with your eyes at all sadly the virtual boy was discontinued only a year after its release and it would take 17 years before VR can make any kind of comeback bringing us to modern day and Palmer lucky this guy was what I would call The Godfather of modern virtual reality Palmer and his team launched a Kickstarter in 2012 for a VR headset called the Oculus you may have heard of it this was meant to be the first truly immersive virtual reality headset and with Kickstarter the team raised two and a half million dollars Facebook will pay two billion dollars in the span of two years VR goes from a dead technology to having every tech company releasing their own version in that time virtual reality became the most talked about tech and it felt like something new was coming out every day glove One released gloves that allowed players to feel and interact with virtual objects HTC Vive comes out allowing players to move freely in this limited space PlayStation vr's released expanding the VR playbase to consoles and omnidirectional treadmills is created that you can use to physically walk around Skyrim and for the first time in decades one of the big three aren't the top selling consoles the Oculus is out selling the Xbox everything in VR looks to be on the up and up the technology is more successful than ever and it feels like VR is going to be the future I mean it's outselling the Xbox how could it not be right I played computer games back in 2002 when I was just a teenager that looked better than this put it on and it's the frame rate's [ __ ] so done with the Oculus just which is done VR isn't doing good for the amount of money that has been poured into VR very few people are actually buying VR games or using their VR headsets although multiple articles make it sound like VR is doing well by stating things like VR has 171 million active users they're actually talking about annual users so your dad or your grandpa accounts as a VR user when he picks up your headset for the first time additionally of those 171 million VR users 110 million are actually augmented reality headset users not virtual reality so really we're looking at only 63 million annual VR players what's even crazier is that on average only 10 of VR users play monthly so there's only six to seven million active monthly VR players to give some context on how bad that is Pokemon go as of May 2023 had close to 80 million monthly players and League of Legends has an average of 150 million monthly players there are multiple games that have 10 times the monthly player base of VR as a whole and I doubt 100 billion dollars reporting to those games this is why VR is what we call a fake Trend it looks like a real Trend because of all the hype and Innovation but even when 20 million Oculus headsets are sold people don't play them Sam Altman the founder of openai put it this way fake friend or at least a fake Trend as of August 2018 I would say is VR but today most people that I know uh that own a VR headset use it never or very rarely and so although a lot of people talk about it and maybe even a lot of people buy them there's not the intense usage per user among the early adopters that I think you want to see so Sam knew even in 2018 that VR was a fake Trend which sucks by the way I like VR but this is where VR technology sits today it's stuck with the early adopters a type of people who are really interested in the next best thing and are willing to deal with the clunky and limited technology but that's not good VR can't leave the Gap to the average person this is for a few reasons number one virtual reality Hardware is just too expensive and bulky I don't see someone strapping a freaking you know screen to their face all day especially if you want to have an immersive experience number two most VR games are gimmicky they're often fun for an hour or two most games just feel like they would fit better in an arcade than on Home console and number three VR is primarily single player making what should be a fun gaming experience often times feel isolating this is why VR is failing again and why virtual reality is only being played monthly by a very small minority of Gamers the technology is just not there yet it was captivating enough to bring people to the VR table and buy headsets but it's not good enough to keep them that being said Sam Altman does say something interesting in his presentation I do believe VR will be big someday like Sam I believe virtual reality is the future just not yet so I don't think the question we should be asking is Will VR be successful the question we should be asking is what needs to happen for VR to be successful and weirdly enough I think the answer lies in Pokemon go 2016 this innocuous Pokemon game was released and it took the World by storm who would have thought you'd find people chasing Pokemon on their phones in Japan Germany Mexico the United States I mean this game was so popular that we had politicians telling people to well Pokemon go to the polls kind of cringy but you get it this game was popular but why was it so popular you could say it's because it's Pokemon Pokemon is the most valuable brand in the world after all but even the best selling Pokemon game of all time has only sold 31 million copies and Pokemon go had 232 million players at its peak so Pokemon go wasn't massively popular just because of other Pokemon games but because of something else something was unique about this game that made it so popular and I believe the top comment of Pokemon Go's trailer will actually shed some light on what I'm talking about it's so silly but watching this trailer makes me feel so emotional even today the summer Pokemon go came out was the best summer of my life not necessarily because of the game but because of how many people I reconnected with overt I would get out of work and with a group of work buddies head downtown there'd be hundreds of people down there just talking catching Pokemon and having a good time random older people would stop us and ask about the game because they wanted to get in involved where older ladies would let us know they feel safer going out on their nightly run with all these people around the game might have been broken but it was definitely something special that brought people together and I hope that I can experience something else like it someday if you notice this person barely even mentions catching Pokemon in their comment they focus instead on the personal experiences they had with others this was the key to the game's success and why Pokemon go was so popular the game facilitated a way for people to go out and interact with one another Pokemon go was taking the experience of going out and meeting friends while adding a new layer to it catching Pokemon as was intended by The Game's Creator Niantic famously stating our mission is to use emerging AR technology to spark creative and engaging Journeys in the real world we built products that Inspire outdoor exploration exercise and meaningful social interaction niantic's goal in creating Pokemon go wasn't for people to have fun catching and fighting Pokemon it was to get people to go out explore and have meaningful social experiences and it sounds like they succeeded this is also the goal of augmented reality which is why I believe AR needs to succeed before a virtual reality can this may sound odd to many isn't augmented and virtual reality one of the same why would augmented reality need to succeed before virtual reality hear me out AR and VR couldn't be more different the way I like to think of it is that augmented reality is taking our world the experiences we have now and slapping a digital lens over it like Pokemon go but virtual reality is the complete opposite you leave the real world to enter a digital one experiencing a simulation that feels real but isn't like Tron Ready Player One or the metaverse it's vital to understand the difference to imagine how they work because if I wanted to recreate the Pokemon go experience in VR right now I would need a headset headphones hand gear an omnidirectional treadmill and a room in my home to house all this equipment but to experience the same thing with ar all I need is my phone and that in-person experience is so much better than the VR experience and all that equipment I'm with real people I'm outside I'm walking around and it didn't cost me anything to get out and play this is known as the natural progression of Technology as technology involves it should simplify and improve the experience not complicate it and water it down this is why the metaverse and VR is failing meta is trying to sell me on the idea that this virtual world this metaverse is better than the real world and I'm not buying it it's not good meta is jumping the gun and violating what we call the six degree Rule and this rule is the idea that you can't shift a market more than six degrees with your product and if you try to it's unlikely your company or product will be successful let me put it this way human beings are slow moving creatures we aren't quick to adopt new things or new trends especially as we get older we get comfortable with what we know and we don't want to learn a whole new thing so as a company you need to make the next iteration the next product the next shift in the market something relatively small something that only changes the behavior of people by less than six degrees for example smartphones people look at smartphones as this world changing technology computers in our pocket and oftentimes we talk like these little computers came out of nowhere but look at the trend first we had to get people comfortable with using phones then we had to get people to buy these phones and put them in their home once most people had phones in their homes people could then be sold on the idea of a mobile phone not to mention home computers and the internet and when that happened we had no problem with the idea of mobile phones adding texting emails and some basic internet capabilities so when the iPhone came out bringing the whole computer to our pocket smartphones exploded into existence this was going to be the new Norm but even then it has taken 15 years to see global adoption it takes time for people to move it's Why Google Glass failed so hard Google was banking on AR being the next step after smartphones like I am but just like what meta is doing now with VR Google jumped the gun with ar in 2013. you see Google Glass was meant to be the next phone why carry a phone in your pocket when you can have access to directions messages play games and more without lifting a finger fits the product trend of simplifying your life right but what Google forgot was the six degree rule you see when Google Glass came out in 2013 we only had smartphones for a few years and many people still hadn't made the jump from a flip phone to a smartphone me included and Google was trying to shift the market too far too quickly at the time the smartphone market was probably somewhere around here on the technology adoption life cycle right at the top of the bell curve so pass the Gap that VR is struggling to hurdle right now but still the smartphone market had only captured 46 percent of the US population there was no way people were going to jump from a flip phone to smart glasses way too big of a leap but now it's looking like it's time for AR to take off and we know this because of Apple no company understands Trends better than Apple they seem to know better than anyone when the market is ready for the next big thing just look at their track record iPod iPhone Apple watch airpods and coming soon Apple glass these are meant to be augmented reality glasses that pair with your phone and according to news sources the glasses will display things such as texts emails maps and games over the user's field of vision sound familiar Apple has also patented a few things like automatically adjusting prescriptions for poor eyesight retinal projections so you don't experience nausea like so many do currently with VR and AR not to mention the glasses can change out backgrounds replacing solid colors with new imagery can you imagine what this will mean for the future I have my iPhone my Apple glasses my Apple watch my airpods and my apple rings I'm walking down the sidewalk by a power plant and I see a Pikachu with my Apple glasses I look down at my waist I see a few digital Pokeballs and I grab one there's haptic feedback from the ring so it feels like I'm actually grabbing a ball the Pikachu notices me and makes a noise that I hear my airpods I take a step back to make sure I'm not looked at as a threat I ready the Pokeball Take Aim and throw the Apple watch and ring sense my arm movement and send the ball flying what was once a simple experience on my phone is now borderline real this is the next step in technology why box myself up in a room strapped all this clunky Hardware living in a digital world when I can experience the real world in a whole new way this is the last hurdle we need to jump with augmented reality to change our perspective on what it's meant to be it's not these weird apps or filters that let me see a tiger on a carpet and it's not even about making AR games it's about gamifying the world around us Gamers right now make up one third of the world's population but with augmented reality Gamers will now make up the entire world's population at least those with access to a phone this is the future of gaming and companies like Niantic and apple understand this AR expands the gaming Market where VR is but a segment of it Sam Altman puts it beautifully in same lecture when he said what you really want to do is identify a market that's going to grow every year and be able to ride that up elevator pause real quick after recording this apple released the Vision Pro an augmented reality headset this was a surprise but it fits perfectly into the conversation alright so if Apple actually knows what they're doing as I was saying why did they just release these Honkers they look like futuristic ski goggles and they cost the same amount as a used car crazy and as I was watching this announcement today all I was thinking was this isn't the next iPod or iPhone The Vision Pro definitely doesn't have mass Market appeal who's going to buy this you'll look like an oddball wearing this headset in public but after my shock of seeing the Vision Pro I realized that these goggles aren't meant for the masses they're to show what's coming so if you look past Cyclops headgear you'll see the ecosystem that is being built you can see here and interact with digital content just like it's in your physical space The Vision Pro is a stepping stone for augmented and virtual reality to test what works and what doesn't for future products which is probably why they focus so much on developers developers can use familiar tools and Frameworks like xcode Swift UI reality kit and AR kit they really want people building for this new system and my guess is in the preparation for the launch of the Apple glass coming in a few years they want the platform in people to be ready for the next iteration of the iPhone so in the same way that Mac introduced us to personal computing an iPhone introduced us to mobile Computing Apple Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial Computing okay all this is great AR is the next big thing I'm excited for it whatever but when will we finally experience a true virtual world when will VR succeed for me the answer is when virtual reality is better and more accessible than reality as time passes and as AR becomes more prominent we will start seeing more mixed reality which is a cross between augmented and virtual reality people will become more comfortable having experiences with this augmented slash mixed reality and the hardware will continue to improve slowly moving that needle towards full virtual reality then a technology like neural links brainship will become mainstream and this is where I see virtual reality truly succeeding I don't need any equipment I don't need to go anywhere all I need is my brain chip and a bed to lie on to experience something incredible that's what she said the way I see it is that the future VR will not be experienced through a lens and physical equipment although this sounds terrible for many right now remember that it won't be the future until we want it to be just like phones it will take years for us to adopt augmented then mixed and then virtual reality but when the time comes to jump into that fully virtual world mankind will be ready hey everyone thanks for watching the video and supporting going Indy real quick I have two things first I had a blast researching and writing this video but man it took a lot of time so if you like this type of video and you want to see more like it give it a like to let me know second we gotta do our indie game shout out and this week our community picked Hades this game is what every indie game should emulate from story to gameplay Haiti captivates you for hours as you try to escape the underworld if you haven't tried this game yet go pick up a copy thanks everyone and I'll see you next time

Channel: Going Indie

Views: 174,896

Keywords: going indie, video game business, video game marketing, game devlogs, Apple, Vision Pro, Apple Glass, virtual reality, VR, AR, mixed reality, Tim Cook, wearing vr

Id: YunxhXF2-A0

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023