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A few years ago, virtual reality was all the rage in Hollywood, helping to fuel the rise of Silicon Beach with the promise of reinventing the entertainment business.
At its peak, investors pumped $253 million into two dozen deals involving virtual and augmented reality start-ups in L.A. and Orange counties in 2016, hoping that pricey headsets projecting virtual worlds would become as popular as smartphones. But investment in the technology has slowed dramatically in recent years, and what seemed like a promising boom has largely fizzled.
Several California companies that raised millions of dollars have shut down or have laid off dozens of workers, as businesses scrambled to readjust their strategies in the face of lackluster consumer demand for VR headsets and a drought of capital.
Take heart, VR enthusiasts. It took several tries for video streaming to catch on, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @07:03AM
All the dev tools for VR are split across a half dozen platforms, controller types, oses, and libraries.
Another issue is the current inability to say, tether a cellphone as a display to your computer, so you can use your cell phone and google cardboard headset to play inside of games running on your PC and streamed over your network/wifi.
The fact that the non-smartphone hardware starts at 300 dollars and goes up doesn't help either. If you want the userbase to make this profitable, you need the hardware pricing starting at 100USD. A hard number to hit, but that is almost into the impulse buy range for many modern day consumers.