Whether you’re talking Facebook’s massive investment in Oculus or Sony’s huge interest in the tech, the stakes are high in 2016 for virtual reality. The Rift, Vive, and PlayStation VR are all slated to hit retail next year. During this type of blitz you would normally hear a bunch of quotes from executives about why their technology is better than their competitors and marketing campaigns built around differentiation. But with virtual reality, something different is happening. Instead of squaring off head-to-head like we’ve seen so many times with Sega vs. Nintendo and Sony vs. Microsoft, we’re instead seeing a sense of comradery from these rival camps.
So what’s driving this uncommon cooperation? We asked the minds driving virtual reality for Oculus and Sony.
Gaining Acceptance
The first time you strap on a virtual reality headset, your perception of what is possible with the technology changes. There’s something magical about your maiden virtual voyage that has the ability to dash so much skepticism while converting you to a true believer and – if the industry is lucky – an evangelist of the technology.
The biggest fear that many stakeholders in VR share is that the crucial first encounter will be ruined by a lackluster experience that was rushed to market before it was ready, thus tainting the mainstream opinion of the technology as a whole. “We could have shipped a consumer product of some kind by now,” Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says. “The reason we didn’t is because we knew it was critical for that first push that we couldn’t afford to ship something that didn’t live up to people’s expectations of what consumer VR could be.”
That sense of mutually assured destruction among all of the major platform holders is the reason we haven’t seen any of them try and get a major jump on the competition like is sometimes seen in the console landscape. With how new the technology is, bad virtual reality from one company means bad publicity for all companies trying to enter the space.
Another huge hurdle facing VR tech is getting people to understand what makes it such a compelling new platform. The problem is that the main selling point for the technology can’t be put on full display through a TV ad or an on-stage presentation. People need to experience VR to truly comprehend it, and that is something that VR companies are working together to solve.
Sony’s president of worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, says that collaboration among the competing platform holders is critical to getting the technology right and ready for mainstream consumption. This includes talking and sharing with competitors, as well as giving demos to and having employees jump between companies. “We like what all three companies are doing…we are confident that if people try one of these, the chances that they will become fond of VR go up,” he says. “Every time one company does demos or participation events and gets new people to try, that’s a win for everyone.”
Getting consumers to try VR and change skeptical opinions through experience is something that these stakeholders all need to work together on. According to Luckey, the competition between Oculus, HTC, and PlayStation in the VR space is secondary to that objective. “We all have this challenge of convincing the public that VR is worth wearing something on your face for,” Luckey says. “That is going to be a bigger challenge than getting people to buy our product over another product.”
On the next page, we learn how these competitors are all working together to make VR great.