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DarthBuzzard on 06 March 2018
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potato_hamster said:
DarthBuzzard said:

500 million isn't going to happen by 2022. However, it will definitely be tens a millions of shipments a year by then. It will take a while for it to grow to that point, but will happen. Remember that even smartphones weren't mainstream until 10 years after their market entrance.

I mean you can speculate all you want on the future sales of VR. My contention in this post has nothing to do with that, but rather your smartphone example. You're talkg about smartphones like the Nokia Communicator which launched in 1996 at $800 USD? Is that honestly a fair comparison? Tell me how many iPhones Apple would have sold in 2007 if Steve Jobs announced the launch price at $1100 ($800 USD with inflation) instead of the $500 it launched at. I bet far less than the 6 million it sold in its first year on the market.

Even still, remember VR isn't new technology. Consumer VR headsets have been available since the early 90's.  Here's the "iGlasses" from 1995 which retailed for less than $1000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNUIwi5F6g&ytbChannel=Hidden%20Below

There was also the VFX-1 that also came out in 1995 for $600. They predicted at the time that VR would be a $6 Billion industry by 2000. Oops.

I was talking about early 2000s smartphones. 

And VR was certainly tried before in the 90s, but only by a few small companies. Sega was one of the only big companies actually trying to push VR but they never made it to market. Nintendo definitely weren't doing anything with VR at the time either, since Virtual Boy is not VR.

Which left you with like 3 or 4 small companies shipping products like VFX-1 as you mentioned.

 

But today, things are very different. You have quite literally the majority of the tech giants working on VR, whereas before hardly any of them did anything related to VR. They're all invested long term as well, knowing full well that this is a market that will take time to grow and they are fully expecting to not turn a profit until later on, though there might be some good surprises like with PSVR being profitable. 

Not to mention the tech now works at a better price point. VFX-1 would be $1000 today, had no positional tracking, had 16x less pixels than today's headsets, had only one 3DoF motion controller without any finger sensing or advanced haptics, ran at a low refresh rate, is heavier, and there was no compelling content at all.

We're going to see the same jump you see from VFX-1 to PSVR in the next 5 years. PSVR compared to a high-end headset in 5 years will feel 20 years apart going off past measures.