Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we’re looking ahead to next year to discuss whether or not 2020 could be VR’s biggest year yet.
“This is going to be the Year of VR,” is often uttered by many early adopters during conversations with people that either haven’t tried VR or are skeptical. But in actuality, VR hasn’t had the meteoric rise many thought it might. That doesn’t mean the industry is failing — it’s still doing well enough and many companies have found success — but the technology isn’t as ubiquitous yet as die-hard believers were hoping.
All that being said, things are shaping up for 2020 to be a big year for VR. Between this year’s growing success of the standalone 6DOF Oculus Quest headset, the impending release of Half-Life: Alyx, hype surrounding the PS5 and PSVR2, as well as general industry maturity, all point to 2020 having the potential be a massively successful year for consumer VR.
In fact, it’s extremely difficult to find someone with Oculus Quest in stock with a little less than two weeks to go before Christmas and if you buy a Valve Index right now you won’t receive the unit until February, inching the delivery expectations closer and closer to the stated Half-Life: Alyx release window. Although that’s all frustrating for expectant buyers, it’s good news for the industry and its rising popularity.
What do you think? Do signs point towards 2020 being the biggest year for VR yet? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
A number of VR developers are quietly working on projects for this year and beyond, while 2018 saw 17,000 standalone $200 Oculus Go VR headsets purchased by Walmart and deployed at stores everywhere to train employees.
Also in 2018, the United States Army awarded Microsoft a contract worth nearly half a billion dollars to augment U.S. service members with enhancements in “lethality, mobility, and situational awareness” derived from the $3,000 HoloLens AR standalone headset.
Microsoft’s HoloLens as seen on the International Space Station.
Magic Leap One
Magic Leap reportedly lost out on the contract won by Microsoft.
The company launched its $2,300 Magic Leap One AR headset development kit in August after revealing earlier in the year it passed $2 billion in total investment, with a huge amount from Saudi Arabia. Magic Leap’s CEO Rony Abovitz suggested in our first face-to-face interview (you can read the entire transcript) that “big” players like Microsoft and Apple are going to spend ten times that amount investing in this technology. We don’t follow the logic, but he claimed those larger efforts will be “much more inefficient” compared to Magic Leap.
Magic Leap One first shipped to developers in August 2018.
China
U.S.-based companies like Facebook and Valve are partnering with China-based counterparts to either tap the vast market in that country or manufacture hardware. For example, Facebook shipped Oculus Go in the United States and elsewhere around the world as the identical Mi VR standalone from manufacturing partner Xiaomi shipped in China without the Oculus Store. Valve, meanwhile, partnered with a Chinese company to launch a version of its Steam PC games store tailored specifically for the Chinese market.
HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin on the runway with a VR headset.
HTC Vive Focus
HTC launched its Vive Focus VR standalone first in China in 2018. The company also launched the Vive Pro and the Vive Wireless Adapter and these two very expensive pieces of PC VR hardware provided some of best VR experiences available in 2018, but only when they work right.
Valve
Valve shipped multiple iterations of its next-generation “Knuckles” hand controllers in 2018.
Valve’s Knuckles controllers developer kit.
Late in year, photos of a VR headset leaked featuring “Valve” on its exposed circuit board. If this finished head-mounted display is paired with the “Knuckles” controllers, and one or more Valve games, it could be exactly what the PC VR market needs for renewed growth.
Valve’s leaked head-mounted display.
The leak came as both HTC and Google started showing the Vive Focus and Mirage Solo standalone VR headsets featuring a pair of “6DoF” point-and-reach hand controllers. While we haven’t gone hands-on with these kits yet, we did try the upcoming $400 Oculus Quest extensively and came away pretty impressed by its tracking performance in highly controlled demos at Facebook’s Oculus Connect VR developers conference.
Transitional Year For Mixed Reality Technology
Overall in 2018, VR developed on private and public tracks.
While some companies shipped standalone headsets publicly, they did so with limited 3DoF pointer-only hand controllers which handcuffed many developers and buyers. Privately, some of these same companies secured new partnerships and worked on more compelling 6DoF developer kits that could spur software design for bigger launches ahead in 2019 and 2020.
Experimental 6DoF controller tracking faceplate for the Lenovo Mirage Solo.
This meant that in 2018 many innovative VR developers were gagged by non-disclosure agreements, acquisitions (like Microsoft or EA) and marketing timelines from funding partners like Facebook or Sony. Some developers closed up shop for lack of funding, too, but many of VR’s most innovative developers were relatively quiet throughout the year as they put their heads down, cut down costs as much as possible and built for the next generation of VR hardware which have fewer of the compromises that were necessary to ship headsets before 2019.
Controller tracking developer kit for Vive Focus.
With augmented reality, Google and Apple improved upon ARCore and ARKit technologies so phones understand the world better. For AR headsets, though, Magic Leap won’t ship two controller support for its AR headset until sometime this year while another long-time AR company called ODG is lining up an asset sale for patents.
Terminator, Star Wars and our visits to both an alien zoo and a haunted world’s fair showed us just how far location-based VR attractions need to go to justify a $20 or $30 ticket. We also tried an experience based around the Alien franchise and an installation from Neurogaming that seemed to be military-grade in its overall execution. We’re still not convinced these types of locations will see enough foot traffic in the United States to cover the cost of their high-rent locations and costly operations, but that is why we were so impressed by the Dave & Busters roll out in 2018 of multiple VR attractions at more than 100 locations. For only $5 per person, up to four visitors to the restaurant chain can take a trip to Jurassic World together in a motion simulator wearing HTC Vive VR headsets.
It is somewhat bad timing that Steven Spielberg’s big screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel about a VR “OASIS” arrived during a relative lull in adoption of VR by home buyers.
The underlying message of that movie was one of warning — not just of addiction — but the way our drive to escape to virtual worlds could erode our desire to improve the real one. The movie depicted a world in which the global population was hooked on VR to such an extent corporations could use drones and AR to operate with impunity in the real world.
While that may seem far-fetched, it also speaks to concern around the role technology plays in our lives. Huge investigations in 2018 by the New York Times and other news organizations drew ire from Facebook’s executives for the overall depiction of the company’s business model and practices, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to answer questions from lawmakers about its role and influence.
When it comes to VR, leaders at Facebook spoke to me in stark terms about how important it is they handle personal data “right.”
“It’s an existential crisis for us,” said Max Cohen, head of product for the Oculus Platform, during a phone interview.
To bridge the gap between the future we could have from the one we will have, here’s what Jaron Lanier, one of VR’s true pioneers, said in 2018 about the risks related to how we use this technology:
Back in the ’80s when I had the first VR startup I was profoundly concerned with this question of this knife edge between technology going good or going bad. Like, to what degree is it about dreams and connection and to what degree is it about manipulation and trickery given that the technology is good for both those things. What makes it go one way or the other? Back then I had a belief about it, which is that if you just said the right things, if you got people excited about it on the right terms, then you could set it on a course where the good stuff would happen instead of the bad stuff. But…I came to decide that wasn’t true. I decided that ultimately the most powerful force is economics and what incentives people have in the system immediately that influence their actions. I don’t think creating a system with good incentives is all you need to do to have a pleasant world. There’s a lot of other factors on different levels. But having a bad economic system can definitely ruin a world.
Also ponder the following questions when considering the future of mixed reality: Is it possible to maintain a shared view of the real world that spans different government censorship regimes and propaganda campaigns when AR and VR filters are built and managed by faceless corporations? If that’s not possible, what does that mean for the world in which our kids grow up?
VR Developers Quietly Build For 2019 and Beyond
Though some VR developers in 2018 spent their time working on projects which were pushed quietly into 2019, like Owlchemy’s Vacation Simulator, others continued to iterate on their early access titles. H3VR, for instance, crossed 100,000 units sold over the course of two years because its creators are in a tight communication loop with fans and they deliver constant content updates.
Beat Saber, in comparison, sold more than 100,000 copies in just one month when its debuted in 2018, anchored by its incredible combination of original music and satisfying cuts. After its PC debut, the game went on to join Astro Bot, Tetris Effect, Wipeout Omega Collection, The Persistence, Moss, Firewall: Zero Hour, Deracine and more in delivering an incredible year of content on PlayStation VR headsets.
Rec Room kept its community together across all platforms in 2018 and, as a result, we saw all sorts of interesting creations, including an acting troupe which delivered an entire production of The Prince Bride performed entirely on a virtual stage.
Kite and Lightning’s co-founder Cory Strassburger took performance capture a step further with an Xsens motion capture suit and the iPhone’s face-sensing camera mounted on a helmet. He worked out a full-body motion capture system for a fraction of the cost of traditional pipelines.
What Will Drive VR And AR Adoption In 2019 And Beyond?
Concept HMD shown by Michael Abrash at OC5.
We also saw some groundwork set down for the next generation of PC-based VR headsets in 2018. For example, the VirtualLink USB-C standard for VR headset cords was supported on some new graphics cards while Valve spent time developing tools so that games made for Windows can run without it on Linux. Meanwhile, the OpenXR standard achieved a milestone showing the same Unreal Engine content running on VR headsets with widely varying specifications.
We also saw demonstrations of light field displays in 2018 while LG and Google showed an 18.1 megapixel panel. A true light field display could one day deliver a multi-user glasses-free experience like the Holodeck while the ultra high resolution display from LG/Google could be key to fully eliminating the sense that VR headsets only deliver a low-resolution version of reality. Both solutions are years from being feasible in a form factor you might encounter in the real world, but nonetheless showed promise.
The two key drivers of PC VR’s first generation, Facebook and Valve, are under increased pressure to deliver a substantial source of revenue from VR hardware and software. We know the Oculus Quest standalone is coming early in the year, and that Valve is building its own HMD, but beyond that we don’t have solid expectations for VR and AR in 2019. We believe that is partially because companies like Microsoft, Valve, Sony and Facebook are playing their cards close, bringing trusted developers into the fold and keeping them quiet until the time is right.
The HTC Vive should not exist. For a troubled company that’s spent much of the past few years making losses instead of profits, the niche and expensive VR market is the last place HTC is going to make a quick buck. And yet here we are, with the smartphone maker and Valve seemingly in it for the long haul.
This time last year the VR community was in an agony of impatience. When the Vive had been revealed that March, we were told it would be releasing before the end of the year. As 2015 progressed, it looked increasingly likely that fans would need a small miracle for that to happen, and no such miracle came. The Vive was delayed at the last minute and the wait for news continued.
Vive started the year with a lot of prove, but 12 months on and many of its owners will tell you it succeeded.
Pre-Release and Pre Release
HTC kept the crowds guessing over the holiday season with a tease that it was adding a ‘game changing’ feature to Vive that we would see at CES in the first week of January. What we got was the reveal of Vive Pre, a near-final version of the headset with a hugely refined form factor including updated controllers and a much sleeker design. We wouldn’t see the final device for a few months yet, but this was almost identical to it.
It wasn’t as much of a game changer as some had hoped for, but it was an encouraging sign that Vive was on the path to release, and not destined to spend another year on the sidelines. Key to HTC and Valve’s strategy was handing out Pre kits for free: I still remember the cheers when Valve told everyone at the Vision Summit a few months later that they would be getting a free Vive, and I still see people using the Pre today.
Ultimately Oculus stole headlines at CES — for both better and worse — with the launch of pre-orders for the Rift. The $599 price tag for Vive’s biggest rival kept people guessing about just how much the more fully featured room-scale headset would really cost. I can imagine a lot of HTC executives letting out a sigh of relief at the reveal, which they knew would go a long way to validating the extraordinary price of the Vive.
Expected Expense
And it seemed to work. The Vive’s price was revealed the next month and, despite being roughly $200 more than the Rift, there wasn’t anywhere near as much frustration from buyers. I’d imagine a lot of people at HTC are patting themselves on the back for avoiding any ball park figures over the past year. Oculus had already set everyone’s expectations.
Still, $799 is an incredible amount of money and this further cemented the reality that mainstream PC VR was still a long way off. These devices were essentially new games consoles this year, and you wouldn’t catch many people laying down that much cash for any new machine. Sony arguably lost its footing as the console king when it launched the PlayStation 3 at $599 in 2005, and now here was a system that wanted considerably more cash for an experience that would still be foreign to many and a big financial risk for people to support.
Some would like to see it as the final nail in the coffin of an industry that never began, but a good deal of faithful VR enthusiasts believed in what HTC was doing: Vive sold 15,000 units within the first 10 minutes of pre-orders opening. That’s far from Xbox or PlayStation numbers, but the message was clear that this is a generation of VR for the early adopters. It’s for hardcore PC players that can afford expensive rigs, which has obviously always been a much smaller audience than the console crowds, but always present and not going away any time soon.
The real question, of course, is how much longer Vive will be aimed at that audience, though that’s a topic for another article.
Surviving on Steam
One of the biggest fears about Vive’s massive cost is the knock-on effect of a small install base diminishing support, but that hasn’t been a problem. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
While Oculus quickly came under fire for the perceived restrictions it put on its Home ecosystem released with the Rift, Vive was praised for its open-ended nature. Valve made it easy for just about anyone to release VR games on Steam, aided by initiatives like Early Access, which allows developers to sell unfinished products to boost funding. Within weeks, we started to see a frankly overwhelming supply of indie games.
To put it in perspective, there are currently 1,102 pieces of Vive compatible content on Steam, be they full games, demos or DLC. It’s been 38 weeks since Vive launched in early April. On average, that’s 29 new releases for Vive a week.
Most VR experiences are short, but that’s still far more than anyone could ever hope to play, and the harsh truth is the store has been flooded with a lot of shovelware. Developers are charging for simple VR rollercoasters built from the Unity asset store, or quickly hashing together ‘[Insert Sport/Activity Name Here] VR’ tech demos that lack industry-standard features such as multiplayer.
In an ideal world, every developer releases their game with ease. It’s great, it sells well, and people love it. The reality of the situation, though, is that content curation is good for the studios that put the effort in.
But there isn’t a lack of quality; good stuff is coming out on a regular basis, but Vive’s biggest challenge this year has been separating the wheat from the chaff. HTC’s Viveport has made some attempt to curate content, though it doesn’t feel like it’s cemented its place as the definitive Vive storefront. That doesn’t mean developers aren’t finding success on the headset. Studios like Survivos and Cloudhead Games confirmed to UploadVR earlier this year that they had already made over $1 million on their then-Vive only projects (Raw Data and The Gallery respectively).
Asia, Alliances, and Accelerators
While Oculus and the Rift have been very much focused on the West, perhaps the most interesting aspect of HTC’s business in 2016 has been its focus on Asia. The Vive still has a healthy presence in the US and EU, but increasingly as the year has gone on we’ve seen more and more announcements come out of the Eastern strand of the Taiwanese company’s business. Take the recent announcement that HTC helped establish a $1.5 billion VR investment fund in China, with new R&D labs being set up in Shenzhen, where the first Vive cafe launched earlier this year.
Logistically, it makes a lot of sense, as the market for China alone has the potential to be far bigger than in any other region of the world and where Vive could make most of its money, especially without as much competition from Oculus in the region right now (Rift still doesn’t even ship to China). It’s also allowed HTC to experiment with new concepts like its Viveport Arcades that act as the middle man in bringing experiences to headsets at sites like Viveland, its huge new arcade in Taiwan.
Alliances and accelerators have been another key part of its play. While Oculus has the spending power of Facebook behind it, HTC has drummed up headlines with even larger amounts of investment money by bringing together venture capitalist firms in the Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA). While that group reviews pitches from startups, HTC’s own Vive X accelerator nurtures them, splitting its focus across China and the US.
You could label these moves as acts of goodwill, though the benefits to HTC have become clear: one Vive X member, TPCAST, is working on solutions that make headsets wireless, and it is starting with HTC’s product, though there’s apparently no restriction on bringing them to Rift and others.
Imagine if you could make the ‘Honest Trailer’ for the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter campaign with the last four years of hindsight. You’d interject Palmer Luckey’s stubbornly optimistic comments about the future of VR with sarcastic quips about how long it would take to arrive, maybe laugh through the original endorsements from Valve in a pre-Vive era, and scoff at the request for cash knowing a $2 billion Facebook acquisition was just a few years away.
But what would you say about the Rift’s first year on the market?
It’s difficult to know where to begin. From mid-2012 to early 2014, Oculus seemed like the only real player in the industry. But in 2016 it’s faced stiff competition as it’s struggled to make its Rift, an excellent product in its own right, stand apart from the feature-complete-at-launch HTC Vive. There are a number of healthy positives to extract from Oculus’ 2016, but there are also a lot of struggles, some coming out of the blue, that have given the company more trouble than it would have liked.
Ball Parks And Back Orders
The year started off in a flurry of hype as Oculus kicked off CES 2016 with the news that pre-orders for the Rift would be going live later that week. People had a few days to get their schedules cleared and be ready to order as soon as possible, with price and shipping date being revealed at the same time. On the morning of January 6th 2016 we found out that the Rift would start shipping on March 28th, and would cost $599.
That startling price put Oculus on the back foot for what felt like the first of many times this year. People instantly rallied around past comments in which the company inferred the cost would be much lower than $599, the same price that infamously put Sony in hot water with its PlayStation 3 launch over a decade ago. Later in the day Luckey would make his first apology of the year after previously suggesting the device would be around (but still more expensive than) the $350 price point of the DK2.
A lot of Oculus’ good will moves (giving away Lucky’s Tale for free and EVE: Valkyrie to all pre-orders, free Rifts for Kickstarter backers) faded into irrelevancy very, very quickly.
Despite all that, stock sold out quick; back orders for the Rift queued all the way up to August over the next few days and Oculus tried to brush off complaints by claiming the headset was selling faster than it had anticipated. That news isn’t very useful without some hard sales stats, though, and even nearly a year later we’re still without any.
Out Of The Frying Pan…
Rift’s pricing would continue to face criticism leading up to launch, and Oculus’ troubles didn’t let up then. From a hardware and content perspective, the VR company delivered with a fantastic headset and massive launch line-up featuring gamepad-based games like Chronos [Review: 7/10], EVE: Valkyrie [Review: 9/10] and Lucky’s Tale [Review: 9/10]. It’s biggest problem? No one could seem to get one.
Even with the months of preparation for launch, Rift’s shipping was nothing short of a disaster. People that were at first guaranteed a unit on day one suddenly found their orders being pushed back, while others that knew they had a long month of waiting ahead found they’d still have to sit it out for extra two or three more months on top. The company didn’t make any friends bringing Rifts to Best Buy before its pre-orders were fulfilled, a move that had likely been agreed and signed long before these problems arose.
There was also the sting of releasing a gamepad-based headset when, a week later, the HTC Vive would also start shipping (along with a troubled launch of its own) with full room-scale user tracking, a feature that took Oculus another 8 months to catch up with. While Rift had fantastic content, it didn’t have experiences like Tilt Brush or Job Simulator, apps that brought you into virtual worlds deeper than ever before using position-tracked controls and room-scale technology.
The Battle Begins
That’s not to say the Rift paled in comparison to the Vive. Content curation has been one of the former’s strongest traits this year thanks to stricter regulations on Oculus Home than on Steam, where developers have quickly flocked to release a flood of apps in the latter case. Even with Vive’s more elaborate input methods, Oculus landed fantastic shooters like Damaged Core [Review: 9.5/10] and high-quality thrillers such as Edge of Nowhere [Review: 9/10] from developers like Insomniac Games.
But this has also been a big source of controversy for Oculus this year, and not all of it’s completely warranted. It’s entire approach to content has been widely panned by those that believe in open PC ecosystems. Some are angered by the exclusive content deals it’s secured, egged on by HTC and Valve’s exclusive-free stance (which will be put to the test with Vive Studios).
Others, including industry big shots like Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, were angered by Oculus pushing its Home ecosystem onto customers. Vive owners can’t get into Home without resorting to unofficial hacks, and Rift owners have to opt in to outside content to use Rift games and apps purchased on Steam. Balancing the realities of business with the ideals of a new industry has been one of Oculus’ biggest struggles this year, and it’s something the company is only just starting to get out ahead of.
At times, though, we’ve found ourselves asking when Oculus might catch itself a break from all these issues. Like when the Revive hack led to extra security measures that ironically opened Home up to piracy, or when the developer of Serious Sam VR stated that the company had offered it a “shitton of money” for timed exclusivity, fueling fires once more.
Really, when would Oculus catch a break?
Casualties Of War
It certainly wouldn’t happen on September 23rd. Just a few weeks before Oculus Connect 3, a bizarre and almost random report surfaced with supposedly on-record quotes from Luckey revealing that he had secretly funded a meme-based internet campaign in favor of now-President Elect, Donald Trump. After a day of anxiously waiting on news from Facebook, Luckey apologized for the second time this year.
Needless to say, this sent shockwaves throughout the industry, the effects of which are still being felt today. Luckey is, frankly, nowhere to be seen, having missed out on Oculus Connect 3 and been completely absent from both Twitter and Facebook. A once charismatic and influential icon for the industry vanished into thin air, though Oculus does promise that he’ll appear once more in the near future.
A Chance To Reconnect And Get Back In Touch
One of the ways Oculus has dealt with its problems this year has been to throw money at them. That was certainly evident at Oculus Connect 3, where the company brushed over its shipping woes and leader losses by talking about how much money it was spending on content and talent and the R&D work it was doing to prepare for the future.
We saw Mark Zuckerberg take up a significant chunk of the keynote conference revealing the future of Facebook and a standalone headset, while impressive new Studios titles showed that Oculus exclusives weren’t going anywhere. We got a final look at Oculus Touch before launch in December, and clarification that, yes, Rift would do room-scale pending that you were willing to pick up a third sensor along with your Touch controllers to accommodate it. There was also a lot of talk about diversity, perhaps to combat the criticisms launched at the company in the wake of the Luckey incident.
Oculus no doubt hopes that Connect can mark a turning point in the story so far. It gave an encouraging glimpse into its future that suggested the setbacks of 2016 weren’t going to slow it down, and that it was ready for what 2017 has to throw at it. Based on the last few months of the year, it does seem to be on the right path.
The launch of Oculus Touch could be seen as a shot at redemption, and Oculus seized that opportunity earlier this month. Touch launched at the expected price of $199, and it did so without any widespread shipping issues. More than 50 games were available at launch, many of which helped the Rift’s library catch up with Vive’s. Not to mention that the vast majority of Steam’s VR games work with Oculus Touch, even without official support.
Touch is a great device, and our favorite VR controller yet. It’s just what Rift needed heading into 2017. But it’s not the only interesting new direction Oculus is taking itself in next year.
Surprise Shake Up
More confusing was the most recent news that Oculus was splitting its work between PC and mobile teams, and CEO Brendan Iribe was stepping down as CEO to lead the PC team. The immediate changes aren’t obvious, but over the course of the next year and beyond we should see an Oculus that more clearly separates its work with the two areas of VR, not that there was much confusion between them in the first place.
We’ve started to wonder if we might be seeing the end of Oculus as a separate company from Facebook. The VR specialist plays a critical role in the future of the social network, and it’s feasible that Oculus becomes more a division of Mark Zuckerberg’s giant organisation than a subsidiary.
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It’s clear Oculus has a lot to learn from its first year with the consumer Rift, but it’s also important not to forget that, at the center of all the many issues with the company, there was a great product. The Rift is a fantastic piece of hardware capable of amazing experiences, and as of this month its also capable of just about everything the Vive is.
2016 was a shaky start for the Oculus Rift, but it’s got every chance to gain ground in 2017.
In November 2015, UploadVR.com marked its first birthday at the dawn of the consumer VR age. That was just before the launch of the consumer Gear VR, and for Upload, it was still prior to the company’s first significant funding. In fact, it was prior to most of the editorial team joining.
What. A. Year.
This week, Upload is marking the start of its third year and this post is exactly article number 3,000 published for the site. Over the last year, Upload as a whole has grown in a lot of different ways. In April, we opened the doors to the first Upload Collective in San Francisco, a hub for VR and AR startups, development, co-working, education, meetups and even live broadcasting. With over 40 member companies in San Francisco, The Upload Collective has quickly grown both in size and in scope. Additionally, founding the Upload Academy, a VR/AR developer training program, which graduated its first class in August with a number of success stories including Found – a gorgeous Miyazaki-esque narrative experience created by four of our students which was recently recognized on stage during the Oculus Connect Keynote.
UploadVR.com also expanded its editorial coverage throughout the year to deliver the very latest news, reviews, features and editorials covering VR and AR. We captured the transition from a couple companies shipping development tools to hobbyists into a fast-moving industry driven by some of the world’s largest tech companies, each of which is selling increasingly sophisticated systems directly to consumers. The transition for both the VR industry, and for UploadVR internally, has been enormous. As UploadVR starts its third year, consumers are bringing millions of VR systems into their homes.
We’ll have more soon about Upload’s next steps, including our expansion into LA and beyond, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to recap the year that saw VR transition to the consumer market.
November 2015
The New York Times distributes more than 1 million Google Cardboard phone VR viewers to subscribers with the launch of The Displaced, a 360-degree video project focusing on children driven from their homes by war.
The $100 consumer Gear VR also debuts during this same period, arriving alongside a virtual arcade from Oculus to let people play some classic games. Oculus had just launched the very first version of its social features for Gear VR, but a year later, we are still spending most of our time in VR alone.
CCP Games, the maker of EVE: Valkyrie, Gunjack and other upcoming VR games, raises $30 million while NextVR gets $30.5 million from Comcast and others, representing relatively early bets on VR content by investors. Eye-tracking startup Eyefluence, which raises $14 million this month, is acquired about a year later by Google.
December 2015
Samsung starts off the month debuting its VR Internet browser for Gear VR, becoming the first to offer a VR browser. Oculus and HTC had been holding details surrounding Rift and Vive launch windows close to the chest, probably because they had delays to announce and need to nail down new plans. In December, these plans become known.
First, HTC delays the Vive until April 2016, with plans to show an updated developer kit at CES in January. At the end of the month, Oculus officially delays the release of Touch controllers until the last half of 2016. This offers a window to HTC and Valve making the Vive the only room-scale hand-controlled VR platform on the market for most of 2016. Oculus, for its part, makes clear that exclusive games like Rock Band VR and bundling freebies like EVE: Valkyrie with orders is how the Facebook-owned company plans to entice buyers.
January 2016
The enormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off the year with major showings for both Oculus and HTC.
Oculus reveals the $600 price for the Rift and opens up pre-orders. The ordering website goes down in the process while shocking some enthusiasts expecting half that cost for the system. When the dust settles, some early adopters find their device won’t arrive until deep into summer, despite the device shipping starting at the end of March.
Meanwhile, HTC shows the Vive Pre-developer kit that would be shipping to developers ahead of the Vive’s arrival in April. Pre-orders for the consumer version are set for the end of February. Valve finishes off the month showcasing many of the games, like Space Pirate Trainer, that will be available via SteamVR in 2016.
Google transitions Clay Bavor into a position as head of VR.
February 2016
Magic Leap kicks off the month with the announcement of an enormous $794 million fundraising round, backed by Alibaba. The money is said to help in manufacturing and launching the secretive augmented reality company’s first product.
A series of announcements from Amazon, Crytek, Epic Games and Unity Technologies showcase an evolution among their respective game engines into VR world creation toolsets. For example, Lumberyard from Amazon is released for creating games and VR experiences, while both Unity and Epic reveal in-VR tools to speed up the development process.
Closing out the month, HTC reveals the $800 price tag of the Vive ahead of pre-orders, while Mark Zuckerberg strolls onto a mobile conference stage in Barcelona and said “millions” would use VR this year. Zuckerberg makes the declaration as Samsung announces the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones will ship for a limited time with the Gear VR for free, along with $50 worth of some of the best games available for the platform.
The month closes with Microsoft finally awakening, announcing it will ship the $3,000 self-contained HoloLens augmented reality developer kit to developers at the end of March.
March 2016
A huge month for VR occurs around the Game Developers Conference and newly created Virtual Reality Developers Conference. The event sees so many people packed into the VRDC sessions, on day two they move the VR sessions to larger rooms.
Among a slew of content reveals, Sony reveals PlayStation VR will ship in October starting at $399, with the first pre-orders available at the end of the month.
The month closes with the arrival of the Oculus Rift alongside more than 30 games. Unfortunately, not many people would be able to try Rift on its launch date.
April 2016
The HTC Vive starts shipping to buyers, bringing the first room-scale hand-controlled VR platform to market. It debuts with what is still today one of the best pieces of marketing available to explain VR, embedded above. In fact, developers using Unity and SteamVR start effectively standardizing this mixed reality capture method. HTC also announces a $100 million VR investment fund.
Meanwhile just after the Rift debuts, “an unexpected component shortage…has impacted the original shipping estimates for some early customers.” While the Rift delay is a bummer, Minecraftdebuts on the Gear VR, representing one of the highest-profile pieces of content to make it to the VR platform from Oculus.
May 2016
The 2016 VR game gets its final player, with Google revealing its Daydream platform with a plan to partner with Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, ZTE, Asus, Alcatel, and Xiaomi to evolve the Android ecosystem and support high-quality VR experiences. Unlike the Gear VR, Daydream features a simple motion controller that can be stored inside the headset itself for travel.
NVIDIA also starts shipping its new generation of VR ready graphics cards led by the GTX 1080. The new generation of cards dramatically lower the cost to get a machine that’s ready to drive VR.
Tension also rises in the VR community as a hack allowing Oculus-purchased games to run on the Vive reveals a dividing line between Valve and Oculus.
June 2016
The E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles is overtaken by VR, with Oculus promising more than 30 games for the Oculus Touch controllers this year and Microsoft making clear it will support VR with its next Xbox console, code-named Scorpio, in 2017.
Valve’s Steam, meanwhile, bakes in support for Oculus Touch, introducing an interesting twist to the platform battle underway. The addition makes it easy for developers to support the Rift and Touch without the difficulty of offering their app through a separate store.
July 2016
The Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA) reveals $10 billion in “deployable capital” from investors including HTC, Immersion Ventures, The VR Fund, and the Colopl VR Fund. Oculus finally catches up on pre-orders for the Rift this month. Unity raises a massive $181 million round to grow its ambitions.
The SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference shows new professional VR tools, as well as research into new areas such as haptics and foveated rendering. A new file format for 3D scenes, glTF, is also gaining momentum with the support of industry leaders like Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack.
August 2016
Samsung unveils the Note 7 smartphone alongside the latest Gear VR. Though the new Gear VR is super comfortable to wear, the Note 7 comes with the unfortunate tendency to catch fire. The problem becomes increasingly clear over several weeks.
Valve begins evolving the VR hardware ecosystem by offering its SteamVR tracking technology royalty-free. The move could open up a world of accessories for SteamVR-compatible headsets while also giving partners with different HMD designs access to a precision tracking technology.
Intel introduces “Project Alloy’, which will deliver technology to partner manufacturers in late 2017 allowing them to deliver wireless headsets that can know their precise location in any room. The headsets are likely not going to be available to consumers until 2018.
September 2016
Samsung issues a worldwide recall for the Note 7 to try and stop the Note 7 fire problem. It doesn’t stop the problem.
In a critical data point for the VR industry, the developers of HTC Vive titles The Gallery and Raw Datareveal their apps each cleared $1 million in sales since release, suggesting small teams with the right idea and execution might be able, right now, to make enough money to support themselves from the sale of a VR title.
Palmer Luckey
Amid a bitter U.S. Presidential election season, a bombshell article connects Oculus co-founder, Palmer Luckey, to a crude political meme group. Luckey issues an apology, and Facebook says he’s still with the company, but the originator of the Rift concept has been completely silent publicly in the months since the revelation.
October 2016
A pivotal period in the emergence of the VR industry takes place over the course of the month.
The Note 7 officially dies, with flights in the U.S. banned from even carrying the fire-prone device as cargo. It dies just in time for Google to debut its Gear VR competitor – the eye-popping Pixel phone and Daydream View headset. The device represents the first member of the Daydream family of VR systems, which should grow to become an interchangeable system of headsets and phones.
The Oculus Connect 3 developer conference gives Zuckerberg the chance to personally reveal the most exciting VR initiatives from the company. This includes new social features, with a VR-to-real-world group video calls, as well as an entirely self-contained headset prototype codenamed “Santa Cruz.” The standalone prototype from Oculus seeks to combine the best of the Rift with the mobility of the Gear VR in a self-contained inside-out tracking headset. Oculus Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash, takes the keynote stage to lay out the improvements we can expect to see in high end VR headsets over the next five years. He predicts field of view potentially widening to 140 degrees as pixel density doubles.
Oculus finally announces the $200 price and Dec. 6th release date for the Oculus Touch controllers. The price puts a complete Rift and Touch system essentially on par with the cost of the HTC Vive, and the Rift is potentially more expensive if you opt for three camera sensors to match Vive’s room-scale capabilities.
Oculus also announces a new optimization it calls “asynchronous spacewarp” that will allow VR experiences to run at lower frame rate. The company is using ASW to support a new minimum specification for the Rift, allowing VR to run on a PC as inexpensive as $500.
Not to be outdone with the Oculus announcements, Valve reveals a new controller prototype that can simulate the sensations of grasping and releasing objects.
PlayStation VR also starts arriving at homes, bringing one of the most comfortable headsets into living rooms worldwide.
After such a busy year, Microsoft upends the industry with the revelation of VR headsets starting at $300, powered by Windows with inside-out tracking.
November 2016
Daydream View starts arriving to buyers with its motion controller and impressive Google apps like YouTube, Street View and Photos included. The single strap design is a hit with some early reviews, but it fits uncomfortably for some. Nevertheless, the new simple motion controller is innovative and the Daydream ecosystem should allow different phones to work with different headsets. That means there should be a variety of designs on the way from Google’s partners all compatible with the same apps.
Unity plans to release its Editor VR environment for content creation inside VR next month. Extensions for Editor VR should allow other developers to add their own functionality to the Unity asset store. This would offer an additional revenue stream for developers creating VR software tools rather than games while also being a first step in allowing developers to do more of their work while inside VR.
Most recently, the unexpected announcement of an HTC-backed startup reveals a $220 accessory for the HTC Vive that can turn the headset wireless when it ships in 2017. It is said to add less than 2 milliseconds of latency to the overall system.
Like many of the announcements in 2016, including Microsoft’s VR headsets, Unity’s Editor VR and even Oculus Touch, we are anxious to get our hands on these systems for extended periods of time so we can get a better idea of just how 2017 is going to shape up. In the meantime, we can recognize 2016 as the year when giants Google, Microsoft and Intel joined Sony, Facebook, HTC and Valve in declaring VR and AR as critical to the future of their platforms.
In 2017, we should start to see the emergence of an early market leader as prices come down, capabilities improve and more content is made available for these systems. Of course, one of the biggest unknowns for 2017 remains the same unknown we had in 2016: What exactly is Apple doing?
