The New Thing: Virtual Reality

Virtual reality has been twenty years away for thirty years. It finally stopped being twenty years away in 2016, when the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive shipped at a quality level that was genuinely usable, and PlayStation VR brought the price down a year later. As of 2018, there are real headsets, a real catalog of software, and real users using them, and the medium is still nowhere close to mass adoption. That gap, between "works" and "works for everyone," is where the interesting questions live.

The way I think about VR in 2018 is that it's where smartphones were in 2007. The first iPhone shipped that year. It cost $500, it had no app store, the keyboard was bad, and it sold about a million units. The product that genuinely changed the world was three iterations and seven years away. VR is at iteration one. The hardware is decent and the price-to-quality curve is going to bend hard over the next five years.

The Three Headsets That Matter

Oculus Rift (and the cheaper Oculus Go) are the bet that VR's growth path runs through Facebook's social graph. The hardware is competent, the software ecosystem is the largest, and the company is pricing aggressively to expand the install base. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion and has been spending steadily on the platform since. The Rift S and the standalone Quest are both on the roadmap.

HTC Vive is the bet on the high end. Better tracking, more compatible with SteamVR, a more open ecosystem, and a higher price tag. It's the headset most VR developers actually own, and the platform with the strongest position in arcades, training simulators, and enterprise applications. It's also the one most likely to lose share if Oculus's pricing strategy works.

PlayStation VR is the bet on consoles. It plugs into a PS4, costs less than half what a PC-based headset costs once you factor in the PC, and ships with a catalog backed by Sony's first-party studios. As of 2018 it's the best-selling VR headset by unit volume, by a wide margin, and it'll stay there until Oculus gets a credible standalone product on the market.

What's Missing

The killer app. Every successful platform has one: the iPhone had Mobile Safari and the App Store. The Wii had Wii Sports. The PlayStation 1 had Final Fantasy VII. VR in 2018 has Beat Saber, which is genuinely good and not enough. Most of the strongest VR experiences are still tech demos, short single-session games, or experimental art pieces. Nothing that pulls a non-gamer into the headset for the second weekend in a row.

The form factor. Headsets are still heavy, tethered (the wireless ones cost more), require a setup process to use, and induce nausea in a meaningful chunk of the population. The next generation is going to fix the tether. The generation after that will fix the weight. The motion sickness problem is partly hardware (higher refresh rates, better tracking) and partly software (UI conventions that don't trigger vestibular conflict), and it'll get better but won't go away.

The Buying Decision

For most people, 2018 is the wrong year to buy a VR headset. The next generation will be lighter, cheaper, and standalone, and the catalog will be much deeper. If you have a gaming PC and you genuinely want to try the medium, the Oculus Rift at $400 is the right entry point. If you have a PS4 and don't want to pay for a PC, PSVR is the right answer. If you have neither, wait.

The platform-level question is more interesting. VR is the first new computing form factor since the smartphone, and the company that owns the platform is going to own a substantial chunk of the next decade of consumer tech profit. Facebook is betting hardest. Sony is the dark horse. Apple is suspiciously absent from the conversation, which is worth noting given how rarely they sit out a category they intend to enter.