VR is hot.
But is it profitable ?
I mean, sure, some “carrots” dev stories will appear soon.
But will it prove profitable for small studios and individuals ?
Perhaps it is safer to get feet wet in VR with some inexpensive Android Daydream solution than Desktop VR ( Vive, Occulus, whatever).
Not everybody, I mean it is reasonable for a high profile studio able to find funding (like chair-Infinity Blade) to invest towards the desktop VR direction, since it is an investment with costs covered - the cost of developing a compelling VR experience is not small.
I think that small studios without funding might benefit from playing with Android VR and wait until Apple makes a VR product before they invest heavily on VR - mobile, desktop, wearable, whatever.
Reason is, usually, apple makes profitable products that last for a couple of years. When their 2nd generation VR is out, around 2019 or something, it might be a signal that VR is mature and investing in it has less risk than today.
The risk I “sense” is that, like the early IOS days, heavy optimizations will be required for decent gaming experiences, which will tax the dev cycles, especially for small teams. The specs will be updated in a year over the year basis, taxing further the development (support gen 1 and use gen 2 features). Unlike the early IOS days, big companies will not wait 2-3 years to enter the market.
Apple has a patent filed for a head-mounted display. It may have simply been intended for movie playback though as the images in the filing show an iPod. At least it looks far less bulky than the other HMDs on the market.
They’ll wait until the market has matured, then they’ll release their version and act like it’s revolutionary, then the hipsters will all say they did it first, and they’ll laugh all the way to the bank with their billions of dollars that they made off of an underpowered and overpriced version of the same thing everyone else was already making for years.
I wish I knew how apple works
“They’ll wait until the market has matured” is the key idea of the first post, suggesting that the absence of a product is a strong indicator that VR is not mature, with the risks and benefits this implies, unless it got lost in translation.
You neglect that Apple does a great job of stepping in right as the market matures. They then release a polished, stable, and somewhat improved product. Nothing revolutionary, but polished.
The real money isn’t in innovation, it’s in improving innovation so that it can be used by the mainstream.
Right now the VR space is where Cell phones were in the time of Blackberrys, where people were starting to put those little sliding pop-out keyboards on their phones, and phones were just starting to do more than make phone calls, send clunky text messages, and play Snake.
They’re essencially in their adolescence right now. This is only the first commercial generation.
Well yeah, thats what I’m saying, they are opportunitstic about it, which isn’t nessessarily a bad thing.
But it’s also true that people act like the iPhone was the FIRST smart phone, and the iPad was the FIRST tablet, and the Apple Watch was the FIRST smart watch, and they were these GAME CHANGING, REVOLUTIONARY devices that had never been done before!
Of course, this is probably how the mainstream consumer market percieved it, but for people who know the reality of the situation, it’s just a little annoying. And how they present it the average schmuck would actually believe it.
This has been their strategy since the original Macintosh, make something that is unremarkable and underpowered, and sell it at a huge markup.
It’s not like their hardware is bad or anything, my friend’s Macbook Air is super nice, it’s just I think more powerful, cheaper options exist that are even nicer.
Exactly, Apple isn’t trying to sell to us. They’re trying to seek to Joe Schmuck, the average guy who wants to play some Kongregate games. Apple gives them exactly that, a great machine to handle it and provides a stable, polished, and simple(in buying choices and use) product. They appeal to the mass, whereas current VR hasn’t made that breakthrough yet, this generation will remain a niche market.
Though to be fair it was likely one of the first truly user friendly and functional smart phones. Remember that iOS predates Android by at least one year. Mobile operating systems prior to those were really awful.
Not really. While those are rudimentary by today’s standards, mobile phones prior to the iPhone was huge market and business. In 2006 alone (the year the before the iPhone), over a billion phones were sold, a little over a 100mil of them were smart phones. And the market was growing at around 15-20% a year for nearly a decade.
VR by contrast estimates total anywhere from 4-16mil. Most of which are mobile. It is a very untested and small market right now. While I have no doubt that Apple is researching it, I would be surprised to Apple move on for a couple of years if the market proves out. It would it is tiny market right now. Though a buddy of mine at work is convinced that VR won’t really take off until Apple makes one.
sorta… They were pretty badass at the time. I’ve had smartphones since the early kyocera and treos. They were pretty amazing at the time. And as awesome as the iPhone was, it was pretty limited at first.
But very true, iOS was a significant leap over anything at the time. It changed the industry. Prior to that “smart phones” were for nerds like me. Now they are common.
Nah, they were powerful, sure, but they were like using pre-Ubuntu linux distros in that they were absolute nightmares to actually use. Apple took the smartphone and made it something everyone could use and pretty much crushed the consumer smartphone and even huge chunks of the feature phone markets.
Well yeah, I’m talking about before that, when Smartphones weren’t quite that smart yet, when only big time nerds would bust out their big clunky PDAs, or this one phone my friend had, it was one of the early ones that had a camera, and it even had this REALLY primitive touch screen, one of those corny textured ones that barely even worked with the stylus. It had no REAL apps (at least as we imagine them today), and people hated recieving texts from it because they were the expensive SMS texts, but it had a flash that could become a flashlight. And that was amusing to us, since his last phone was one of those Motorola Razers I think
This thing was less of a phone and more of a conversation piece back then. I mean, we are talking this was like early in high school for me, so it was probably some time in 2005-ish. Back then it was like the new hotness and was the most advanced thing anyone had ever seen, but today it would look mostly like a joke, the thing barely fit in his pocket.
This is what I imagine when I see today’s VR. Sure, the market numbers aren’t the same, but neither is the market. These kind of phones in that time period were just as niche as VR is now, where it’s just on the edge of mainstream conciousness, but not something serious yet.
Yeah, to me, I feel like this is something that will make more sense in the home thearter experience first long before it works as something on the go. I just can’t imagine someone sitting in public doing VR without someone walking by and punching them in the head and walking off with their stupid, cardboard covered phone.
Of course, to me VR will always be a niche experience, like 3D glasses and iMax, at the end of the day it’s just too inconvient and sorta not worth it for the average person.
I think another part of it is no one has really figured out the best use case for it yet, I have yet to see a game made that had good gameplay that used Oculus, and I even worked on an Oculus Rift game at the GGJ a few years ago. It was like any other VR experience, where visually it was super cool, but mechanically there was very little to do.
I think once someone really figures out what VR is good for, then maybe my opinion will change
The iPod and the iPhone would kind of indicate otherwise.
Now, I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t refine and improve on existing technology. Clearly they do. But they have had their own disruptive and highly successful innovative products as well. One could argue that those products helped bring them back into a position of prominence.
A lot of the other qualities that Apple exhibits are what will keep them successful. (supportive corporate culture, superior customer service, an almost extreme focus on refining user experience in their products, etc…) But Apple is no stranger to disruptive tech.
That said, I don’t think that the fact that Apple hasn’t gotten into the VR game yet means anything. Apple wasn’t prescient with the release of the iPod or iPhone, they were lucky. They saw an opportunity and exploited it effectively. But this doesn’t mean they are making the right or wrong choice in not more aggressively pursuing VR. VR is in its infancy, and is still a very risky proposition. It’s no wonder that they aren’t going “all-in” on it.
