October 07, 2024
VR is a young technology that hasn’t had massive successes and the same enormous financial backing as the PC industry. Every VR machine is designed from the ground up and development costs are astronomical.
By 1995, you had a PC that allowed you to pop three or four components into a $99 motherboard and fire it up with a $19 power supply. RAM and CPU prices were in the stratosphere, but they dropped like a rock in 1996.
VR designers don’t have the luxury of using off-the-shelf components (yet) other than maybe the Snapdragon XR1 and XR2 SoC chips. Everything else is cobbled from scratch with lead times easily exceeding 18 months in many cases.
Oculus 2 virtually killed VR in the mainstream because of its $399 price tag. No one can possibly compete with that. In order to get a better VR headset you really need to spend about $1500 for a Valve Index or whatever is all the rage this year.
It will take developers with extremely deep pockets to compete with Valve and Oculus. For the moment the tech remains very niche and investors seem to be erring on the side of caution. I would like to see Apple delve into VR, but they are poised to attack the AR market with Apple Glasses.
I am not sure how I feel about these. To me, they feel a bit like an expensive solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. I am far more enthusiastic about the future of VR.
WWDC begins June 10th, so I am sure we will know more in about three weeks.
