This entirely depends upon your definition of “broad adoption.”
My definition is that VR equipment becomes common enough to be a “Black Friday” doorbuster at Walmart (and not a specialty technology/electronics store.)
Why? Women make up roughly 73% of the purchasing power of the United States market, and similar stats elsewhere. [1] These women are determining what gets brought into their home – and it isn’t VR Goggles for Porn. They’re looking at commercials and sales flyers for major retailers to determine what to buy for their family.
In order for one of those sale offers to be “enticing,” it has to be something you actually want to have for yourself, or to give as a gift.
When you want something, the price is actually a secondary consideration. People will spend large quantities of money on things they don’t need if they are convinced it is something they must have.
Unfortunately, right now, VR is an expensive, geeky looking toy. It has a long way to go before it is something people will fight tooth and nail over on Black Friday.
What could do it, though?
VR needs to be wireless
There are wireless goggles around, but the latency is terrible. It needs to be a seamless experience.
VR needs to be glasses-less
I am the owner of an Oculus Rift.
Wearing it hurts my ears, nose, the back of my head and my forehead, and after a few minutes it makes my face uncomfortably sweaty. Any time I turn my head, it shifts around so I have to keep one hand holding it in place on my face, basically losing the use of one of my hands.
This is not just an Oculus problem – any of the VR headsets I’ve seen have this issue. They’re one-size fits all, which means they’re no-size-fits-any.
Look closely at this image below:
This is a hologram, called a Vocaloid. Thousands of people attend Vocaloid concerts across Asia (and in the rest of the world, as well). They’re not real people. They’re holograms. People go out to see them in concert as if they were real, paying real money for it. If they had to wear glasses for it, they would not be nearly as popular.
I can’t stress this enough – the masses will not adopt VR if it means they have to wear a big clunky thing on their head. It will never be more than a curiosity.
VR needs to be a user-friendly experience.
iPhones had faster adoption rates because the setup is easy. There aren’t so many screens to click through. People understand how to uninstall and reinstall things.
Android took a while to catch up, and they’re a breeze to connect. Even the embedded smart apps within televisions have easy walkthroughs.
But you can’t afford to get it “wrong.”
If a customer has a poor experience at any step of the way, they’ll post bad reviews that will linger online forever. This will deter possible future sales, and make it harder to get wide-spread adoption.
VR needs to have a purpose
If the first three points are solved, then you still are only part of the way there. People will not adopt VR unless they have something they can use it for in their lives every day.
That would be the “killer app.”
TV and Movies have hinted at this, with living hologrammatic displays, but how often are we working like Tony-Stark and whipping through files or putting together complex prototypes?
Realistically, I can see the killer app for mainstream VR as being a Global Chat Room, like the Star Trek Holodeck.
When people will be able to “visit” with others around the globe in real-time, and have auto-translation to “speak” in any language, people will buy it en masse.
Footnotes
[1] Buying Power: Global Women
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/Once-affordable-what-will-be-the-killer-app-that-drives-virtual-reality-to-broad-adoption
Originally Posted On: 2016-02-23