[ed. C'mon. Please. It's porn, just like it's always been since the dawn of the Internet.]
It’s a huge year for games, with tech giants dropping billions on Mojang, Twitch and Oculus VR.
But at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles, the company’s first developer conference, the consensus is that while virtual reality games will be fun, they probably won’t be the content that convinces average consumers to try VR. Instead, developers here say, the lure will be social and media experiences, and games will come later for most users.
The mainstream-crossover question is a salient one, as Oculus is expected today to lay out its roadmap for getting the Oculus Rift headset on consumers’ heads. As co-founder Palmer Luckey told conference attendees at a welcome reception, the company is counting on the developers in attendance to fill its app store.
“Without content, nobody would be interested in this whole virtual reality thing,” Luckey said.
Multiple developers at Oculus Connect pointed to the already-announced Samsung Gear VR, a mobile virtual reality headset developed with Oculus, as an indicator of the future.
“It’s the mobile experiences,” said Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Gray. “You can download from the store, which you already do every day. It’s just like with mobile games, when people were like, ‘I’m not a gamer,’ and then you’re like, ‘Well what about Bejeweled? What about FarmVille?'”
Alchemy creative director Phil Harper agreed that mobile has already taught consumers how to spread a killer app around once it emerges.
“People already understand how to share an application,” he said. “Those moments where people gather around someone who has a Gear VR headset and someone says, ‘Look at this!’ It’s going to create those ‘you have to check this out’ moments, and the easier it is to get involved in those moments, the better.”
One of the most buzzed-about VR experiences at E3 this year was, in fact, not made for the most casual audience. It was a (I’m unanimously told) terrifying VR slice of the upcoming horror game Alien: Isolation, based on Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film and developed by English studio The Creative Assembly; despite the hype around that experience, TCA programmer Sam Birley volunteered the first Oculus hit might be something completely different.
“I’m not really sure what the killer app is, yet,” Birley said. “I don’t think it necessarily has to be games. Social interaction is a massive draw to VR. Hypothetically, say they had some form of gaze tracking in the Rift. Being able to form eye contact in VR would be so powerful.”
It’s a huge year for games, with tech giants dropping billions on Mojang, Twitch and Oculus VR.
But at Oculus Connect in Los Angeles, the company’s first developer conference, the consensus is that while virtual reality games will be fun, they probably won’t be the content that convinces average consumers to try VR. Instead, developers here say, the lure will be social and media experiences, and games will come later for most users.
The mainstream-crossover question is a salient one, as Oculus is expected today to lay out its roadmap for getting the Oculus Rift headset on consumers’ heads. As co-founder Palmer Luckey told conference attendees at a welcome reception, the company is counting on the developers in attendance to fill its app store.“Without content, nobody would be interested in this whole virtual reality thing,” Luckey said.
Multiple developers at Oculus Connect pointed to the already-announced Samsung Gear VR, a mobile virtual reality headset developed with Oculus, as an indicator of the future.
“It’s the mobile experiences,” said Otherworld Interactive co-founder Robyn Gray. “You can download from the store, which you already do every day. It’s just like with mobile games, when people were like, ‘I’m not a gamer,’ and then you’re like, ‘Well what about Bejeweled? What about FarmVille?'”
Alchemy creative director Phil Harper agreed that mobile has already taught consumers how to spread a killer app around once it emerges.
“People already understand how to share an application,” he said. “Those moments where people gather around someone who has a Gear VR headset and someone says, ‘Look at this!’ It’s going to create those ‘you have to check this out’ moments, and the easier it is to get involved in those moments, the better.”
One of the most buzzed-about VR experiences at E3 this year was, in fact, not made for the most casual audience. It was a (I’m unanimously told) terrifying VR slice of the upcoming horror game Alien: Isolation, based on Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film and developed by English studio The Creative Assembly; despite the hype around that experience, TCA programmer Sam Birley volunteered the first Oculus hit might be something completely different.
“I’m not really sure what the killer app is, yet,” Birley said. “I don’t think it necessarily has to be games. Social interaction is a massive draw to VR. Hypothetically, say they had some form of gaze tracking in the Rift. Being able to form eye contact in VR would be so powerful.”
by Eric Johnson, Recode | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
