SF authors have a lot to answer for. While they are popularly assumed to predict the future, most will be quick to disclaim any Nostradamus tendencies. Instead, they are trying to tell a story, and the setting is only a part of that effort. The problems arise when people read the story, fall in love with the setting — and decide to enact it in real life.

I’m as guilty as any other nerd, with my unmarked keyboard meant to evoke Case’s deck in Neuromancer that always got him into trouble at customs. I also have an Ono-Sendai sticker on my MacBook, just to complete the look. That sort of thing is mostly harmless. What about the people who read Snow Crash¹ and decided to build the Metaverse, though? They read passages like this and think to themselves: "whoa, cool, I gotta build that":

He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse.

And so they went and built those things. This is literally the origin story for a lot of the tech we have today, from the iPhone as Star Trek communicator on down. When it comes to VR, you might expect that now of all times, with nobody able to go to the office, VR would be having its moment. But it isn’t, at all.

Sure, there are hopefuls like Spatial, sometimes described breathlessly as "the Zoom of VR" — but it relies on the Oculus Quest hardware, which is hardly universal, or Magic Leap, which may never be seen at all. I tried it on the web and it’s buggy right in the signup experience, definitely not something I would introduce to colleagues, let alone clients.

Maybe when Apple brings out its AR headset we’ll have a platform worthy of the name, but right now VR just isn’t there. I’m a techie, an early adopter, and if you can’t sell me on VR when a) I can’t leave the house and b) there’s a new Halflife game which requires VR, I think it’s safe to say it’s a small niche and going to stay that way.

I’ve been fully remote for a long time, but most people, even among those who had the choice, preferred to go into offices. Now we are all forced into the WFH life, but it’s awkward. Too many Zooms, too few, how much communication is needed or wanted, what needs to be synchronous and what can go async via Slack — and how do we manage all of that when many of us are also juggling other responsibilities? The home schooling, oh God the home schooling. Give teachers raises yesterday, they earned them.

Part of the stress of WFH is communication, and the pitch of meeting in VR is to approximate the experience of a real meeting better than just a grid of people’s heads on screen. It turns out, though, that experience is sufficient for most purposes. People are using Zoom for karaoke, cocktails (quarantini, anyone?), weddings, graduations, and just about anything else.

So Where Did VR Get Lost?

Even with the head start of everyone stuck at home and hating it, VR still has not taken off. The reason is the sort of impact that always means that the future will not look like the past or even a linear extrapolation. It’s easy to think of remote working and see that it requires good bandwidth, that people with good written skills and ability to manage their own time might thrive, and so on. Not many futurists had considered the impact on a family with both parents trying to work from home while juggling child care and home schooling, for instance.

This is one reason why even in lockdown VR hasn’t taken off (that and it’s still too expensive, but that’s a chicken & egg problem). I’ve taken tons of conference calls — yes, even on video — with a baby in my arms², or keeping one eye on the maths homework going on next to me, or simply with one ear cocked for mischief being perpetrated somewhere else. VR, if it works properly, excludes all of that.

Some of the reluctance to embrace new tech is also the fear of obsolescence. If we can all go back to the office as soon as possible, the old habits and rules that enabled people to be successful in the past can be reimposed and those people can go on being successful without having to learn something new or change their behaviour in any way.

This reluctance also applies to tech platforms themselves. Remote events — and all events are of course remote for the rest of 2020 at least — default to the tried and true format of fast-scrolling comments beside live streamed events. This format was already tired ten years ago, but nobody has come up with anything much better. Partly there wasn’t a need, because it was easier just to rent out space in Vegas or Orlando and run the conference there, and partly there wasn’t a platform to build on. That last issue is of course another iteration of the chicken-and-egg problem: nobody has been able to build a platform because the users weren’t there, because nobody had built it, and repeat.

That consideration leads us back to Apple potentially jump-starting the whole VR-AR market by pulling their usual trick of holding back, looking carefully at what’s out there, thinking really hard about the use case, and then bringing out something that defines the market such that soon afterwards it is seen as inevitable and everybody else simply has variations on Apple’s theme.

Until that happens, though, the Zoom+Slack combo is the best we have, and we had better get used to it.

We discussed the topic of remote working on Episode Two of Roll For Enterprise, a new podcast I co-host. Listen to the episode, and subscribe if you like what you hear!

🖼️ Photo by Hammer & Tusk on Unsplash

Here’s the thing with VR: nobody has yet figured out what – or who – it’s actually for.

It seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting some wild-eyed evangelist for VR. Apparently the next big thing is going to be VR tourism. On the one hand, this sort of thing could solve problems with overcrowding. Imagine if instead of the Mona Lisa, smaller than you expected, behind a barrier of smudged glass and smartphone-wielding fellow tourists, you could spend undisturbed time as close as you wanted to a high-pixel-count scan. And of course, being VR, you could take selfies from any angle without needing to wield a selfie stick or worry about permits for your camera drone.

On the other, you wouldn’t get to spend time in Paris and experience everything else that the city has to offer. At that point, why not just stay home in your favourite chair, enjoying a piped-in virtual experience, like the passengers of the cruise ship in Wall-E?

That’s the question that the VR industry has yet to answer successfully. Much like commercial-grade fusion power, it remains fifteen years away, same as fifteen years ago, and fifteen years before that. In fact, back at the tail end of last century, I played Duke Nukem 3D in a pub¹ with goggles, a subwoofer in a backpack, and something called a 3D mouse. The whole thing was tethered to a pretty hefty gaming PC, which back then probably meant a 166 MHz CPU and maybe a first-gen 3dfx Voodoo graphics card.

It was fun, in the immature way that Duke Nukem was, but once the novelty of looking around the environments had worn off, I didn’t see anything that would make me pay the not-inconsiderable price for a similar setup for myself.

A couple of years ago I was at some tech event or other – maybe MWC? – and had the chance to try the then-new Oculus headset. I was stunned at how little the state of the art had moved forward – but that’s what happens when there is no clear use case, no pull from would-be users of the product, just push from people who desperately want to make it happen.

Now, the (virtual) chickens are coming home to roost. This piece in Fast Company admits the problems, but punts on offering any solutions.

The industry raised an estimated $900 million in venture capital in 2016, but by 2018 that figure had plummeted to $280 million. Oculus—the Facebook-owned company behind one of the most popular VR headsets on the market—planned to deliver 1 billion headsets to consumers, but as of last year had sold barely 300,000.

Investments in VR entertainment venues all over the world, VR cinematic experiences, and specialized VR studios such as Google Spotlight and CCP Games have either significantly downsized, closed down, or morphed into new ventures.

[…]

Ultimately it is down to VR developers to learn from existing success stories and start delivering those "killer apps." The possibilities are limited only by imagination.

Apple, more clear-headed than most, is postponing the launch of its own VR and AR efforts. This is particularly significant because Apple has a history of not being the first mover in a market, but of defining the use case such that every other player follows suit. They did not have the first smartphone, or even the first touchscreen, but it’s undeniable that these days almost every phone out there looks like an iPhone.

It’s not clear at this stage whether the delay in their AR/VR efforts is due to technology limitations or the lack of a clear use case, but either way, the fact that they could not see a way to a useful product does not bode well for anyone else trying to make a go of this market.

Shipping The Org Chart

The players who are staying in are the ones who want VR and AR to succeed for their own reasons, not because they see huge numbers of potential users clamouring for it. This is a dangerous road, as Sun found out to their cost, back in the day.

A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback.

— @mcc@mastodon.social (@mcclure111) November 18, 2019

Read the whole thread, it’s gold.

Here’s the problem for VR: while I don’t doubt that there is a small population of hardcore gamers who would love deeper immersion, there is no killer app for the rest of us. Even console gaming is struggling, because it turns out that most people don’t graduate from casual gaming on their smartphones to "serious gaming". This is the other thing that will kill Google Stadia.

The one play that Apple might have is the one that seems to be working with Apple Arcade: first get devices everywhere, then slowly add capabilities. If Apple came out with a physical controller, or endorsed a third-party one, Apple TV would be an interesting contender as a gaming platform. The same thing could work with AR/VR, if only they can figure out a use case.

If it’s just the Google Glass thing of notifications, but RIGHT IN YOUR EYEBALLS, I don’t think it will go anywhere. The only convincing end-user demo I’ve seen is walking or cycling navigation via a virtual heads-up display, but again, that’s a niche use case that won’t support an entire industry.

This one image set back the AR industry by decades.

I already don’t have time for video, because it requires me to be somewhere where I can pay attention to video, listen to audio, and not be interrupted for maybe quarter of an hour. Adding the requirement for substantial graphics support and power consumption, not to mention the headset itself, and extending the timeline to match, further reduces the applicability of this technology.

But go ahead, prove me wrong.

🖼️ Top photo by Juan Di Nella on Unsplash