We are all waiting for the predictions of Mike Abrash to come true. The head of Facebook’s Reality Lab believes virtual reality has the same potential as the personal computer, and that it will become the most powerful creative and collaborative environment ever. As he does each year, he pointed to a bright future in a speech at Oculus Connect 6, Facebook’s annual VR conference in San Jose, California.
“VR hasn’t changed the world yet, but it will,” Abrash said. “The interesting question is, ‘When?’ I have some good news and some bad news.”
Abrash admitted being a bit too optimistic, and that he doesn’t know when the full vision for VR will materialize. He still believes that it will happen, and that’s good thing. A lot of venture capital investors, software developers, and others have been burned on their investments, and they no longer believe. While those folks have given up, Abrash is still trying to invent the future.
For consumer virtual reality to survive the gap of disappointment, everybody has to believe in it. Consumers. Game developers. Other app makers. Investors. And platform owners. OC6 gave us some clues on what Oculus believes about the future of consumer VR. To me, the moves I saw show just how many tradeoffs there are.
The small victories that help feed belief have come. Beat Saber has sold more than a million copies across all VR platforms. And I was delighted to hear at OC6 that the Johnson & Johnson Institute wants to scale virtual surgery training to all doctors around the world.
But after the hype went out of the VR bubble, the collapse was tough. Google retreated from the Daydream VR business. Apple still hasn’t launched its rumored augmented reality HUC99 product. Magic Leap’s AR device feels like it’s a long way from a consumer reality. And so that leaves Facebook, Valve, and HTC to carry the torch. HTC continues to feed products into the high end in the hopes that enterprise VR will take off. Oculus is going after that market, too. I’m not sure what Valve is really doing.
