What VR Needs In Order to Succeed

VR headseats are already excellent. My Google Daydream headseat from 2016 takes me into another world, producing an emotional experience. If you haven’t seen it, you can’t imagine it. The tech is also affordable, at a few hundred dollars.

Why, then, has VR not succeeded yet?

In my opinion, it boils down to three reasons:

• Content

• Discoverability

• Engagement

Let’s discuss each of these in detail:

Content

Every technology has a high point of what you can create with it. This is impressive 1080p:

HDR lets you create its own masterpieces:

Watch the above on a device that supports HDR, like the iPad Pro (2020).

Now imagine content of this caliber, but in HDR.

For VR to succeed, billions of dollars should be spent creating content of this quality. Or, I should say: creating art. The word “content” is demeaning to these artists. Create 100 great pieces of content in every category from sports to nature to space to erotica. Set up a weather station that gives you the weather forecast in VR every day. Set up a religious channel where you can see inside a temple. A news channel that takes you inside the chaos in Kabul. And so on.

Then create interactive experiences. When we say interactive experiences, games are the first thing that comes to mind, but positioning VR as a gaming tool will curtail its potential. For example, can we have a VR videoconference? There are a lot of interactive experiences possible if we just think about what makes sense.

No matter what your tastes are, you should have lots of great content.

All this will cost billions, and the money should be spent generously to make the platform succeed. This is a “go big or go home” decision.

Discoverability

There’s great VR content like…

… that’s hard to discover.

When designing discoverability, focus on quality over quantity. Don’t let the platform be taken over by clickbait and other junk like Youtube, where there are 100 junk videos for every great video. This happened because Youtube worked to maximise watch time, for many years. This resulted in a race to the bottom. But quantity doesn’t matter beyond a point: 82 years worth of content is uploaded to Youtube every day. You can’t watch that much. Better to go with a smaller, higher-quality library, like Netflix.

Tweak the recommendation algorithms to maximise satisfaction over watch time. For example, give a heavy weight to how many videos are shared, like the clips I shared above. Count a video as viewed only if a person completes watching it and does not downvote it. Give a 100x weight to videos watched multiple times by the same person, because such videos truly are exceptional. Don’t race to the bottom like Youtube did.

As another example, think of how Apple curated the iOS app store, ensuring a great quality of user experience, intuitive UIs, apps that don’t crash or hang, and so on.

Engagement

VR is great, but I haven’t used my VR headset in months, simply because there’s nothing drawing me to it. We need to figure out how to solve this, perhaps by optimising for engagement like Facebook does. Not to that extent, but a little engagement boosting is required to keep a platform alive.

In summary, creating great content, make it discoverable, and fixing engagement will make VR succeed.