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Exploring a new frontier this holiday shopping season: Virtual reality
Exploring a new frontier this holiday shopping season: Virtual reality
It is a sad truth for technology enthusiasts that it's almost the end of 2016, and we still don't have flying cars, a moon colony or fully functional robot butlers. But there is at least one sci-fi technology that is aiming to make a breakthrough into your living room: virtual reality.
Do you think VR of some level, either mobile or enthusiast, will be the major tech product of this holiday season?
I personally would love to get an entusiast level VR headset, probably the Vive, but at the level of investment required I'm not ready to pull the trigger. With having a family to raise, I'm pretty confident I will wait for Gen 2 to be released. My wife did recently upgrade to the Pixel phone so I may end up asking for the Daydream 2 to start testing out VR.





Yeah, I would love to see it take off, but as you've pointed out, the entry price for a decent experience is not that accessible yet. Nor do I think we will see much innovation in the software and concepts supported by this stuff until it's more widespread, and the economy of scale in production makes it available to all kinds of users and developers.
I think (going on one of conference presentations last week that shared some studies of VR/AR in training environments like architecture and medicine) that the initial big wave of of proliferation might benefit from early adoption in technical training environments, where a user pays model helps to grow the industry in interesting ways.
Yeah, the cost of entry will be vital in getting VR to grow. I'm really excited to try Daydream to test the limits of what is possible as Mobile VR. If it can be formed into something more powerful that 360 video, then we can achieve the scale required to get VR to catch on. I'm also watching Playstation VR closely too as I think that will also be the best branch of the enthusiast tier of VR headsets in terms of getting VR to catch on in the mainstream market.