Accompanied by Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of Oculus, the ancient technology virtual reality with 560 years of history has once again triggered the attention of the technology industry. However, there are indications that this VR boom is still difficult to form a climate. According to the latest news from foreign media, the amount of investment in global VR and AR plummeted by 80% in the first quarter just ended.
What needs to be emphasized is that virtual reality is not innovative technology. In history, VR has repeatedly triggered industry and company interest, but it has repeatedly failed. The main reason is that the technology is immature and it is difficult to become a popular application.
According to a report by Crunchbase, a market research company quoted by foreign technology media, in the first quarter, the global venture capital investment in VR/AR was only US$200 million (a total of 26 companies were invested), compared with US$1 billion in the same period of last year (29 companies financing ) plunged 80%.
The company said that the first quarter of 200 million US dollars also created the lowest record of investment in the past year.
In addition, in the first quarter of 2016, due to a large-scale financing by augmented reality company Magic Leap, the financing amount data was higher. However, the relevant charts show that in the past few quarters, the global investment in AR and VR start-up companies has shown a gradual decline.
The decline in venture capital investment is consistent with market fundamentals. Public opinion generally believes that the dream once woven by virtual reality seems to be still far away. Facebook has always been the world’s largest promoter of virtual reality, and in the United States, Facebook’s Oculus has closed 200 stores in VR demo stores because of the lack of popularity.
In addition, sales of the three full-featured virtual reality helmet manufacturers in 2016 were very disappointing to the outside world. According to the agency's estimates, Oculus sold only 200,000 units, HTC was about 400,000 units, and Sony was relatively successful with sales of 900,000 units.
The experience of using virtual reality helmets is still quite poor. For example, helmets need to be connected to game computers through lengthy cables. Users also have to worry about being tripped by cables during the movement. In addition, the old problems of vertigo are not completely solved.
In addition, many smart phone manufacturers have introduced inexpensive mobile phone helmets, but the virtual reality experience is rough, many devices only provide panoramic videos, and the immersive experience of “moving as users move†is unmatched. . The "window effect" presented by these cheap helmets has also caused many consumers to come and go.
Including Facebook, HTC, and other vendors, have promoted the bright future of virtual reality, but currently including helmets and high-end computers, the total cost of nearly 2,000 US dollars, a very long distance away from the start of a popular market.
Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook, was once considered a vanguard of virtual reality. However, this company also encountered Waterloo. The founders' team has left or been demoted. The company recently announced a quarter-price reduction due to poor sales due to pricing errors. . Oculus has become a laggard from the once leading company. Facebook and Oculus are facing a huge compensation of 500 million U.S. dollars due to alleged theft techniques.
At the recent Facebook development conference, from Zuckerberg to executives, everyone suddenly began talking about augmenting reality. Virtual reality suddenly fell out.
According to reports, companies such as Qualcomm, Intel, Google and Facebook are developing helmets for all-in-one computers that do not require cables to connect to external computers. This may increase the experience of using virtual reality. However, it is not yet known when mature products will be available. In addition, if you get rid of the external computer, whether the processor of the all-in-one computer can have powerful computing capabilities and present vivid and rapid changeable immersive scenes to the user is still unknown.