Rolling Out the Carpet
Only five years have passed since the 3DTV and 3D-cinema gold rush carpeted the floors of the world’s largest technology trade shows, including NAB and CES. Since then, the trade-show floor has cycled through VR, drones, cloud computing, AI and robots in everything. We have also seen the commercial arrival of volumetric and light-field capture, Instagram and Snapchat AR filters, HDR, Alexa in every room, self-driving cars and government-subsidized Tilt Brush art. Many of these technologies existed while 3DTV was still the buzzword. I’m talking about the moment when they became products.
Nearly every VR commercial I have seen so far features an estranged partner staring open-mouthed at something while neglecting a spouse, child or other responsibility. Where is the America Online-style pitch for VR and AR? Too soon? Exactly.
The Cart Before the Horse
The rise and fall of consumer 3D has become a cautionary story about media deployment. Manufacturers asked the public to trade up before there was enough content to justify the purchase, and the market collapsed. VR and AR risk repeating that mistake.
The work produced in VR and AR so far has been inventive and often beautiful. Early projects were necessarily demo-like and basic, but they tested important ideas. Many talented people rushed into the field and began finding out what these media could do.
The 3D wave of the early 2000s produced its own advances in digital imaging, visualization, projection and distribution. Within a decade, the industry achieved better colour and contrast and far more sophisticated control over depth and convergence. The old promise of a shark jumping out of the screen began to look laughably basic.
Much of Avatar’s richness came from James Cameron’s use of depth. He pushed the image inward, drawing audiences into a world, instead of throwing swords out of the screen and making them duck. His real-time computer-generated and live-action production techniques—later used by Steven Spielberg on Ready Player One—also anticipated forms of virtual production and VR cinema capture. That work gave the industry one strong on-ramp to immersive media among many possible ones.
Audiences still complained. They often paid the surcharge for 3D in theatres and resented having to do it. At home, the proposition was worse: a passive television experience now required an expensive pair of glasses for every family member and every guest. It was unrealistic, even absurd.
Bringing It Home
The hard part is getting from invention to everyday use. So far, VR has produced no broadly appealing application with the utility of a news program or the easy familiarity of Jeopardy! or Wheel of Fortune. A true consumer application should justify the hardware required to run it. At launch, that hardware should be something a person can take off a Walmart shelf, bring home, plug in and use immediately.
In 2017 and 2018, the VR industry pivoted toward the claim that out-of-home (OOH) and location-based entertainment (LBE) were the real killer applications for VR. This is an important market. Arcades were returning as professional video gaming and esports were growing. Calling LBE the true market for VR, however, felt like a cop-out.
Where is my Atari 2600 or NES? Where is my Alexa or Philips Hue?
I want my MTV.
We need to decide what we are trying to build. Is it a development platform, a set of professional authoring tools, a home appliance, mainstream entertainment or all of these at once?
Each part of the industry needs to be judged by its own aims. Research and development should explore possibilities and defy assumptions. Business-to-business and enterprise tools do not need to worry about sales at Best Buy. Consumer hardware does. Wide adoption requires pragmatism about price, setup, comfort, usefulness and support.
A New Interface Grammar
Onboarding remains a basic obstacle. Even if installation became a push-button process, the interfaces themselves would still be inconsistent. After almost five years, a few conventions are emerging. Rotating reticles for teleportation have become more common, which is useful. So have in-experience recording, social sharing and, sometimes, cross-platform cloud saves.
From the beginning, many of us have argued that user experience has to come first. VR will not feel ready until the industry addresses it. The difficult question is how soon we can reasonably demand consistency from a medium still being invented.
Old interface habits cannot simply be transplanted. In spatial media, a menu does not have to appear as a floating 2D panel. Designers have height, width and depth to work with. Digital information can also be mapped onto real-world markers, a capability that will eventually become mission-critical for augmented reality. The field needs an interface grammar of its own.
Human beings have been designing experiences for centuries, yet spatial computing still contains large areas of terra incognita. Developers need to compare what works, explain why it works and give one another room to make mistakes. That conversation is how conventions will emerge.
A Medium Takes Time
In our top 10 indie games of 2018, we noted that the games shared a new degree of care in how they handled the player experience: entering and leaving a game, saving and restoring progress, and accommodating casual and hardcore players.
I began covering games in 2008. It took the indie game industry about a decade to arrive at a reasonably consistent player experience. Along the way, developers established genres, made strange mash-ups and produced blockbusters such as Minecraft, The Binding of Isaac and Stardew Valley.
VR’s first major breakout, Beat Saber, followed experiments such as Beat Boxer and Light Saber Trainer. It combined the appeal of lightsabers with the compulsive clarity of Dance Dance Revolution at a moment when esports was rapidly expanding. The result is immediately legible: most people understand what to do within seconds. That simplicity came after years of experiments, false starts and discarded ideas.
Janet H. Murray wrote one of the foundational books about narrative in digital and spatial media, Hamlet on the Holodeck. She titled her later book Inventing the Medium. That is exactly what is happening now, except that dozens of industries are trying to invent it at once.
I recently defended a company caught in an online pile-on because it was taking too long to deliver a crowdfunded, high-resolution and technically complex product for less than a thousand dollars. I reminded its critics that this had never really been done before. When companies hit snags, constructive pressure is more useful to backers than ridicule that helps drive the company into bankruptcy. This work is hard, and the underlying technology will continue to develop whether individual products succeed or fail.
Consumer 3DTV never became the market that Best Buy, Walmart and their suppliers expected. It still ignited conversations and technical developments that are reaching fuller expression in VR and AR.
Standards Without Sameness
Concepts such as interocular distance, parallax, stereoscopy and perceived scale became part of the industry’s working vocabulary. Continued progress depends on communication and, at times, shared standards. The goal is not homogeneity. It is enough compatibility for creators, manufacturers and audiences to benefit from one another’s work.
The industry needs to pause periodically and compare notes with developers, manufacturers, researchers and the public. Where does friction occur? What remains unsafe, confusing or inaccessible? Which consortium is actually developing standards, practices, protections, ethical guidance and conventions with both creators and users in mind?
The IEEE is doing some of that work, though it is not primarily a consumer organization. The Consumer Technology Association published an industry glossary only in July 2018. The XR Association is trying to connect major VR companies including Samsung, HTC, Oculus, Sony and Google. Microsoft is conspicuously absent, despite being one of the world’s largest software companies and supporting headsets made by Acer, Asus, HP and others.
In Writing on Both Sides of the Brain, Henriette Anne Klauser compares the editorial mind to Caliban and the free-associating creative mind to Ariel, both from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Each has a role, but they work at different moments. An experimental phase needs room for untested ideas. An editorial phase needs a stable objective and the discipline to finish what has already been promised.
Immersive technology is due for some editorial discipline. Companies need to tune their products, deliver what they owe and reduce needless variation in pricing, interfaces and installation. Early adopters have given the industry considerable patience and good faith. It is time to repay some of it.
What the Medium Is For
Then the exploration can accelerate again. Cable changed network television. Home video changed the television schedule. Streaming changed cable. Consumer 3D followed a different path, and VR is unlikely to replace television. Its stronger opportunity may be to meet people where they already are and branch into experiences that older media cannot provide.
We are still discovering what immersive media can be. We do not yet know what it will be used for or how it will settle into daily life. In 2019, the field is advancing quickly: 6D.ai can capture the geometry of a space in real time with an iPhone; increasingly complex AR filters arrive with each update to Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit; and full-body systems such as Teslasuit combine haptics with biometric sensing while waiting for creators to decide what to do with them.
Think back to the early days of Twitter or Facebook. Few people imagined that social platforms could sway elections or become the primary channel of communication for the president of the United States. The consequences of immersive media will be just as difficult to predict.
The medium needs time to reveal itself. The industry also has to connect its experiments to ordinary users through products they can understand and operate. A viable user experience lets people discover what a technology is good for—and lets its creators see how it might serve them. We are still doing this for human beings, right?
When the Pieces Finally Meet
Eventually, the industry’s separate lines of development begin to circle back and connect. I recently realized that my dusty Oculus Go—the tetherless consumer darling of the late-2018 VR wave—could play my media through the Plex VR app. The next day, I realized I could use it to watch a 3D movie on a virtual screen as large or as small as I wanted, in sync with a friend online. Whoa. The same was possible with Gear VR, which meant Samsung Galaxy S6 through S9 owners could join, as could people using Daydream with a Google Pixel.
That was a genuine epiphany. The development cycle was not one year, three years or five. It was a set of separate technologies and habits gradually settling into place after repeated iterations, nudges and feedback. Their cumulative effect gave me a nearly out-of-the-box 3D cinema on a tetherless headset, complete with blockbusters I could watch with friends.
Is anyone thinking about putting a box office in front of this? Someone should be. The next question is what that box office should look like and how it can support creators at every stage of production. It is time to start figuring that out. Come together, right now.
Addendum:
After I asked my astute friend Truffle Jones to review the final draft, he pointed out that it’s the distribution, stupid. I have edited part of his reply for clarity and length below:
From the perspective of someone working in technology, you’ve hit the nail on the head about building a platform before its content. That shortsightedness has sunk many gaming platforms, let alone broader concepts such as 3D, VR and AR. But I think there is an unarticulated idea at the heart of your piece: distribution. Content is king, as the saying goes, and that is mostly true. Distribution, however, is mandate.
The internet had distribution long before it had content. Distribution is necessary for growth because it feeds the supply side of supply and demand. Demand without distribution breaks camels’ backs. Distribution without content still gives you somewhere to put content.
In hindsight, it’s easy to look at the early technologies in your essay and see that a lack of content was only part of the problem. Many of these platforms were also killed by time. Nobody knew whom they were for, let alone what they were for. They were simply, to borrow a phrase, “insanely great,” and therefore presumed necessary. They meandered in search of an audience, then died when one failed to appear.
Geoffrey A. Moore’s classic Crossing the Chasm explains that a technology has to move from islands of incubation and visionary early adopters to a deliberately narrow beachhead market. It has to win over an early majority there, then move into adjacent markets quickly enough to achieve mainstream acceptance.
The mass consumer needs to be told what something is for, rather than left to harness its greatness. Dreamers will devise their own distribution schemes and repurpose existing channels to support the next thing. The mainstream will never do that work for itself.
(NPR’s excellent How I Built This podcast offers example after example of creative, strategic approaches to distribution and production problems.)
Companies cannot simply develop platforms and products and say, “Bam—there it is! Now use it!” The purpose has to be explicit. The product needs to be packaged, articulated and easy to adopt. Companies often get in their own way. After spending haystacks of money on research, testing and production, they understandably rush to monetize. They may not know exactly what they have created, only that they need to see a return on it.
That is why so much fails: companies put the return on investment ahead of a well-distributed, clearly articulated minimum viable product. The market is not simply unready. It may not even know it is a market until someone tells it. Product launches often overlook that work.
Today, there is plenty of “content” for 3D, AR and VR platforms. If Pokémon Go was supposed to prove that AR had arrived in the mainstream, the relative silence that followed suggests that nobody has figured out AR yet. That frenzy was an amuse-bouche for whatever comes next. The real strength of 3D, AR and VR may lie beyond gaming and educational content. They may become distribution platforms for something we have not yet identified.
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