VR will come on strong, soon

I read an interesting article today in The Atlantic by Alexis C. Madrigal, The Weird Thing About Today's Internet.  Madrigal lays out a brief 10 year history of the internet with its impact on both business and culture.

She states that in 2007, the year Apple introduced the iphone, almost no one owned a smartphone.  She then points out, "Now there are 2.5 billion smartphones in the world.  That's more than double the number of PCs that have ever been at use in the world."  With those sorts of numbers, in the near future when VR goggles are given away with your purchase of a phone and those phones are running an OS designed for a 360 3D interface, 2D media will quickly become the "only if I have to" choice of younger audiences.

It's all about large amounts of customers and capital

25 years ago VR got off to an arrested start and was doomed for the time being for a number of reasons.  Experience of VR in the 1990's required all sorts of special OS platforms and viewers, such as QuickTime VR for Apple (released 1995) and VRML for Silicon Graphics (WWW approval 1994), thus the number of people who could even access VR was extremely limited.  None of this would lead to wide acceptance and predictably these formats faded out.  Today, however, with the integration of VR into smartphones, billions of people can access the environment easily.

Furthermore, in the 1990's there was very little capital available for development of VR.  Now the world is very different.  Madrigal points out the five most valuable companies in the world today: Apple, Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.  Madrigal states, "In mid-May of 2007, these five companies were worth $577 billion.  Now they represent $2.9 trillion worth of market value!  Not so far off the combined market cap ($2.85) of the top 10 largest companies of 2007: Exxon Mobil, GE, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, AT&T, Citigroup, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, and Bank of America."

The implications for this shift are dramatic in a number of ways, but from a VR development perspective, this shift means VR will develop much more quickly in the coming years.  All of these companies are developing media production arms and all are investing in VR hardware and software development.  This is the first time in the history of VR that the top corporations in the world were all heavily invested in VR development.  The result will be a rapid expansion of this new GUI.