Without a doubt, yeah.
> What’s the highest number of concurrent users? I would dare say it’s fairly low.
Just above 90,000 [0]. Yes, a far cry from the billions of existing social networks. But I think that's because of a couple of factors, owing to...
> My point is quite simple: the consumer market has rejected consumer VR for almost 10 years now and I don’t think that’s going to change. The issue with VR for the average person is in its very nature, where are you alienated from everything around you.
this. I believe the rejection of consumer VR is not primarily because of the alienation factor - it's because the experience has sucked and costs a lot more than people are willing to spend on a new experience.
I'm a long-time believer in VR; I've been paying attention to it from its 2012 resurgence. However, in that decade, I've seen a few fundamental reasons for why people either don't bother trying it out, or give up shortly afterwards:
- Cost. A good PCVR experience can easily cost thousands of dollars. For VRChat, you really do want that experience (you can only access a subset of content on standalone), and it does not come cheap.
- Comfort. The headsets are not comfortable to wear for extended periods of time.
- Isolation. You can't see outside of your space, and other people can't see what you're doing.
- UX. The companies progressing VR have historically not been very good at UX - it's very easy to have a subpar experience with the software.
- Software. There's some high-quality content, but there's not enough of it to sustain interest.
The reason I still believe in it as a medium, despite these problems, is that they're not fundamentally insurmountable blockers. Despite all of these very annoying problems, the strength of the medium still shines through to those who can tolerate it.
There are paths forward for each of these problems; the cost of hardware will be driven down, headsets will get lighter and smaller, there are solutions to let reality in and to let others into your reality, and software troubles can be fixed with iteration and concerted effort from companies who can be bothered.
My existence proof of these things are the existence of the Quest lineup, the Bigscreen Beyond, and the Vision Pro. They all solve parts of the problem - with the Vision Pro being the strongest showing to date - and it's not too hard to envision a future in which one ecosystem has a solution to all of them. It will just take time and effort.
At present, I see the ecosystem being not unlike pre-iPhone smartphones; they exist, they work, but they're lacking the fundamental polish and comforts that a wider audience requires. And like the iPhone, there will come a moment where those things come together, and it will become accessible to the wider consumer market.
I don't think that's happening soon - the Vision Pro is three thousand dollars more and a few hundred grams more than it needs to be - but there's a path forward.
I also don't consider AR to be a separate technology; it's a part of the wider spectrum of XR. Improvements in AR will feed into VR, and vice versa. The Vision Pro is a VR headset masquerading as an AR headset, after all.
[0]: https://medium.com/@nemchan_nel/vrchat-breaks-records-with-9...