Social VR’s best platform is the open web, not pricey headsets
That mainstream appeal for VR continues to elude the mixed reality industry in Western markets is a point I touched on last week when I encouraged startups to embrace China as a go-to-market. I don’t think it’s so much a case of the Asian market being some anomaly that defies the laws of the hype cycle model but, rather, that its industry is more fluid in adapting and aligning itself to its audience than industry leaders are in the West.
In other words, how mixed reality is received and how adoption proceeds has less to do with the current state of the hardware and more on how it is being packaged and delivered.
From the very start of this current VR hype cycle, leaders in the space have been betting the farm on high fidelity content, and continue to do so despite the market signals of 2016. Unity, for instance, accounts for over two-thirds of immersive content, and it is a game engine that is inherently tailored to hardcore gamers.
While it is reasonable to expect a hardcore gamer to put up with the layers of friction that a game engine’s ecosystem entails, mainstream users are different. Gatekeepers and walled gardens, downloading and installing, and the hard requirement of a VR headset (more on that later) together create way too big a barrier for this to be the right platform-market fit for the mainstream, especially at such an early stage in the industry.
I have been a pretty aggressive advocate during the past couple years about the open web, on the other hand, being the mainstream-ready platform for the job and, thankfully, WebVR, the JavaScript API that allows you to load immersive content on your browser, has been steadily growing in popularity. Its upcoming upgrade to the WebXR API, which soon welcomes AR support so that developers can create mixed reality content that is responsive across the full spectrum of VR and AR devices, will only make it that much more obvious why we should be prioritizing the immersive web.
There is no better way to illustrate why the open web is the best platform for fostering mass adoption than to apply it to arguably the strongest use case for mainstream mixed reality there is: social VR.
Back in November, Mozilla announced the creation of a dedicated team tasked with enabling the social 3D web, and then last month they released the early preview of what they have coined Hubs by Mozilla. That “people shouldn’t have to be locked in to a specific platform or device”, wrote Sean White, the chief R&D officer at Mozilla, is the essence of why this experiment in bringing people together in mixed reality will, I think, go farther than any pre-existing social VR “application”. And the timing is perfect.
Virtual worlds shouldn’t be difficult to access. Once you enter a virtual space in Hubs, all you have to do is share the URL with your friends or colleagues, and they can instantly join regardless whichever device they have available. Even wearing a headset is optional. Indeed, White characterizes it as letting the technology get out of the way so that the experiences can take center stage.
“Hubs is designed to ensure people can access the product regardless of what devices they own or platform they are on, and supporting users who do not have headsets just yet is a large part of that.” says Greg Fodor, the engineering manager for social MR at Mozilla.
The point isn’t to downplay the value of mixed reality hardware, says Fodor, but that the priority be placed in making the collaborative space as inclusive as humanly possible. That is the glaring weakness that pre-existing social VR applications have to contend with since they are inherently restricted by the fact of being “mini walled gardens” nestled within platforms that are, also, walled gardens.
