Texas, USA January 28, 2022 Residents wear Oculus Quest 2 VR devices for a virtual meeting
In 2017, Zuckerberg called out "I want a billion people to use Oculus headsets."
Five years later, this VR device, which is hoped to be the "Metaverse entrance", has just sold the threshold of 10 million units, and the task progress is 1%; The sight of VR glasses is still far away.
The reason for the slow progress is largely due to the advance hype of VR technology, resulting in the content not keeping up with the demand.
In 2016, known as the "first year of VR", capital flooded in, and most of the tech giants you can think of with names began to deploy. But when they pulled out their own VR equipment, they found that limited technology, poor content ecology and poor user experience could not attract consumers to pay for it.
After a few years of stagnation, VR is once again making waves with the fervor of the metaverse concept. During the quiet time, the expanded content ecology has made VR much more playable, and many people who once held a wait-and-see attitude also have the desire to buy.
This time, is VR soaring, or will it rise and fall again?
The "content" bottleneck
At the beginning of this year, when seeing the news that Sony released the next-generation VR headset "PS VR2" at the CES 2022 conference, Xiao Guo recalled the PS VR that he had kept in the drawer for a long time.
"After I bought the first-generation PS VR, I was shocked when I played "VR Girlfriend" at first, but there was little novelty in the back. Occasionally, when friends came to visit, they would let them experience "Rhythm Lightsaber"." Xiao Guo said.
Xiao Guo's situation is not an isolated case. In the early days of the VR boom, various headset makers iterated on hardware fairly quickly, aided by advances in PC specs. However, due to factors such as cost and market, major manufacturers like Sony cannot keep up with such an iterative speed, so that nothing has changed in the five years since the birth of PS VR. This is obviously uncompetitive in the rapidly changing consumer electronics market.
Despite this, the PS VR remains one of the most commercially successful VR headsets, with over 7 million units sold, just behind the Oculus Quest 2.
Different from the active blueprints drawn by various manufacturers for VR technology in the fields of industry, retail, medical care, art, education, etc., the reason for ordinary people to consume VR is still focused on entertainment.
On the content side, it's an undeniable fact that most of the content available for download in VR today is video games and adult videos. Compared with TVs and projectors that are placed on large screens and can be watched by the whole family, the high privacy and strong immersion of VR obviously caters to some entertainment needs.
In addition to home use scenarios, another common use scenario for VR is in the "VR experience hall". At a time when head-mounted display devices are not yet popular, their existence is like an Internet cafe 20 years ago when home computers were not popular.
In the experience hall, although people are carrying backpacks, wearing helmets, holding induction devices and fighting virtual monsters, it seems a bit funny to outsiders, but here, the experiencers can taste early adopters and perceive new technologies. It still has a lot of significance for the development of VR technology.
The technology media Upload once conducted a survey on "low VR penetration rate". The survey results show that high hardware prices and niche attributes are not the main reasons that hinder the popularization of VR in the consumer market, but "lack of attractive content, user experience problems and cost." "That's it.
Obviously, if VR wants to be popular, it still has to rely on content to win. Just like after the blockbuster "PUBG", most players seek to improve the performance of graphics cards and memory capacity to make "eating chicken" less laggy, VR also needs at least one work that causes Luoyang to be expensive. Whether it’s a game or any other application, if there is no such thing as the kind of work that everyone is crazy about, then saying that VR is going to be popular is no different from saying that “Heroes of the Storm is going to be popular”.
And what exactly will this content be? The emergence of the "metaverse" makes the answer gradually clear. Although it is impossible to refine which theme and which game it is, the tech giants are certain that it will definitely appear in the metaverse, a category that combines socialization and entertainment.
giant duel
Science fiction writer Stanley Weinbaum wrote a novel in 1935 called Pygmalion's Spectacles.
The protagonist of the novel is a young businessman named Dan Burke, who meets a professor in New York who has developed a peculiar device: it looks like a gas mask, but has integrated glasses.
The survey results show that high hardware prices and niche attributes are not the main factors hindering the adoption of VR in the consumer market, but "lack of attractive content, user experience issues, and cost".
Dan puts on the device and enters a virtual paradise, where he meets a genie named Galatea and quickly falls in love, immersed in the joy of fish and water. When he returned to the real world, he questioned Galatea and was relieved to find that not everything was virtual.
This sci-fi idea with a bit of obscenity since its birth is considered to be the prototype of VR headsets.
The development of technology allowed people to slowly approach this idea until the Oculus Rift came out in 2012. Seeing the huge potential of VR technology, Facebook, not yet called Meta, bought Oculus for $2 billion just two years later.
Facebook has invested nearly 10,000 employees in the company's VR business, but due to poor product experience, delayed new product tickets, and continued business losses, the outside world has evaluated this acquisition as a "disaster-level".
That didn't change until 2020, when the Oculus Quest 2 hit the market with "the best VR headset in all." Under multiple pressures, Zuckerberg, who bet on VR early, is probably relieved.
There is a saying in the field of consumer electronics that when the number of users exceeds the tens of millions, the content and ecosystem of the entire industry will often achieve leapfrog development. The reason is that among millions of consumers, the profitability of hardware and software companies can mostly cover the development cost, which is conducive to the continuous development of software and hardware and improves the technical level of the entire industry.
The most striking change in the VR industry in China is also an acquisition.
In 2021, ByteDance acquired Pico, the leading manufacturer of the domestic VR industry, at a price of 9 billion yuan, which is also the largest acquisition in China's VR industry so far.
Pico was established in 2015. The company's full name is Beijing Xiaoniaokan Technology Co., Ltd., mainly engaged in the research and development, production and sales of VR all-in-one machines. Pico is backed by Goertek, which has made it through the "cold winter period" in the past, iterating products at a rate of almost once a year, and achieving "the leftover is king".
Tencent was also interested in acquiring Pico for a time, but chose to give up after bidding with Byte. The market generally believes that Pico, which was established in 2015 and mainly focuses on VR all-in-one machines, is valued at about 2 billion yuan. Tencent's abandonment is likely to feel that the price is not cost-effective.
Bytes sold at a very high premium and sold a larger proportion of the stock, which is a detail worth pondering. For Byte, the acquisition of Pico is not a cost calculation question, but a multiple choice question about the company's strategic direction.
VR technology has been developed for six or seven years. Compared with the first accumulation of other large manufacturers, Byte obviously does not need to start from scratch. Because Oculus cannot enter the country, Pico, which is the largest domestic company, has almost become the only option for the rapid growth of bytes. Moreover, the 9 billion yuan in 2021 is still a lot cheaper than the 2 billion US dollars in 2014.
