Virtual reality has fallen out of favor among American teens, according to a new survey from Piper Sandler released Tuesday.
While 29% of teens surveyed owned a VR device (87% owned an iPhone), only 4% of headset owners used their VR device daily, and only 14% used their VR device weekly.
Teens also didn’t seem very interested in purchasing the upcoming VR headset. Only 7% of respondents said they were planning to buy a headset, compared to 52% of teens who were unsure or uninterested.
This isn’t the only bad news about VR that has come out recently.
Bloomberg reports that Sony’s new PlayStation VR2 headset is expected to sell 270,000 units as of the end of March, according to data from IDC. It originally planned to sell 2 million units in the same period, Bloomberg reported last fall.
In fact, the number of VR headsets has generally declined.
According to IDC, headset shipments last year fell 21% to 8.8 million units.
“This survey further demonstrates that the current state of VR is very business-focused,” said Rolf Illenberger, managing director of VRdirect, a company that provides enterprise software solutions for metaverse and virtual reality.
“The pandemic has further accelerated advances in VR and AR usability in the office, and the launch of new devices will mean more to developers building real-world use cases than to teenagers looking for entertainment,” he said. . Hypergrid business.
But that may be wishful thinking.
Consumer and business interest in virtual reality declined last year, according to IDC.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how Microsoft and other companies backed off their VR and AR plans. And the bad news kept coming.
In mid-March, Google announced the end of Google Glass Enterprise. And last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Disney had shut down its Metaverse team, and Truth in Advertising, a nonprofit advertising advocacy group, reported that Walmart had shut down its Roblox virtual experience.
Even Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg seems dissatisfied with the metaverse. In his March letter, Zuckerberg announced a “year of efficiency” and 10,000 layoffs, saying the company would now focus on AI.
“Our biggest investment is advancing AI and building it into all of our products,” he wrote. The Metaverse is Meta’s biggest investment. For 2021 and 2022, its Metaverse unit, Reality Labs, reported losses totaling nearly $24 billion.
Given the explosion of interest in AI since the launch of ChatGPT late last year and the clear and obvious business benefits, I have serious doubts that anyone will be investing heavily in enterprise VR this year.
Ultimately, generative AI is poised to solve a variety of business challenges, starting with improving the efficiency of marketing, customer service, and software development. And virtual reality is a technology that continues to find problems to solve.
I’m a huge fan of OpenSim. But other than presenting at the OpenSim Community Conference in December, I can’t remember the last time I was out in the world for a conference. It’s all Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, and sometimes Microsoft Teams.
Oh, and here’s another disappointment. I watched Game Developer Conference presentations from Nvidia, Unreal Engine, and Unity. I don’t play many video games except on my phone, so I never realized how amazing the graphics, environments, and characters were. I saw the original AI presentation and it seemed crazy, but the visual realism blew me away. I feel the urge to run out and buy a game console right away.
Now, a general-purpose platform like OpenSim doesn’t need to have the same level of graphics to be successful. For example, the early web had very poor graphics compared to those available in commercial add-ons like Flash. And look at Minecraft. Graphics-wise, it couldn’t be worse than this.
So the graphics were great, but that’s not what I was most worried about. No, I was looking at AI-based environment creation capabilities. It’s not just Unreal and Unity. There are many AI-powered startups that make it very easy to create immersive environments, interactive characters, and everything else you need to populate a virtual world.
With the basic Unreal and Unity plans available for free, is it worth it for developers to add these AI features to OpenSim? It may feel like a horse-drawn buggy with a jet engine. I mean, you could try, but the buggy might explode into shrapnel the moment you turn it on.
am i wrong?
If you go into OpenSim and say, “I want there to be a forest over there,” would you see it sprouting up before your eyes? Could we have AI-based NPCs that we can talk to in real time? And can we create interactive, playable in-world experiences that go beyond dance and chat and slot machines?
But there is good news.
AI tools help accelerate everything, including software development and documentation. As large companies retreat from enterprise VR, open source platforms like OpenSim provide an opportunity to use these tools and catch up by seizing a window of opportunity. Maybe we can take the lead in the hyperlinked, open source, interconnected metaverse of the future.